Zendesk, a Danish startup that markets a nifty cloud-based, on-demand help desk system, has raised an undisclosed Series A round of funding from Charles River Ventures which it intends to use to expand its customer base worldwide, starting with the opening of new headquarters in Boston. That move makes sense because apparently over 70% of its customers are currently located in the United States.
The company declined to comment how much financing it secured from the VC firm exactly, but in a telephone conversation did say it was a fairly small round. Zendesk previously raised $500,000 in seed funding from PageFlakes co-founder Christoph Janz and other angel investors.
Zendesk is a web-based, SaaS-delivered help desk / support ticketing solution that gives companies, big or small, a simple way to manage incoming support requests from end customers. The aptly-named startup is delivering its hosted help desk system, which can be set up in just a matter of minutes, to a wide range of customers, including some familiar names like Rackspace, Condé Nast, MAXroam, Twitter, MSNBC and Scribd.
Zendesk comes with a free version, but it is fairly limited since you can only provide support for up to 50 end-users, plus you don’t get to brand the interface. There are six packages that you can subscribe to on a monthly basis (all come with a 30-day free trial), ranging from $19 for 1 support agent to $475 for 25 agents. Needless to say, these prices are way below what most traditional help desk system vendors dare charge for their products and services.
I very much like the fact that the startup is so laser-focused on what they do and do well, instead of overloading the product with unnecessary features or over-extending it to broader use (i.e. project management, to-do listings, etc.). That would put them up against some stiff competition and it seems to be carving out a nice niche for itself by focusing on end-user help desk management as it is, so that just wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Zendesk was also smart enough to have come right out the gate with an extensive API third-party developers and/or customers can use to plug the tool into other applications.
Bet we’ll here more from this company in the future.
Well done Zendesk.
Solid product. Solid future.
It is always good to see fellow companies with a well-defined business model from day one.
Good luck.
Niyi
This article may be of interest to the engineers at Zendesk:
Applying a Case-Based Reasoning to Help Desk Application
CBR (Case-Based Reasoning) expert system is superior and robust compared to traditional non-expert system for applications such as Help Desk. The knowledge base grows with every new case that has not been previously available in the knowledge database is being captured . This means that the system’s knowledge base database increases over time.
There are more publications available on CBR (just Google). Also there are a few journal proceedings on CBR that are available , just check your local University Library , otherwise check out the publishers website – LNAI (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence).
One of the top researchers in the field of CBR is Dr. Ian Watson from University of Auckland , New Zealand and he consults on CBR technology. Its worth paying experts to develop/consult on cutting-edge methods/technology, it means one thing and that is a world beating technology. There are different types of CBR and their performance do vary, so this is why it’s important to seek outside expertise on the CBR if Zendesk doesn’t have that already.
Another useful link for a CBR tool from the US Navy is shown in the link below for their NaCoDAE (Navy Conversational Decision Aids Environment) inference engine.
KM Tools: NaCoDAE
I have got a copy of the NaCoDAE (written in Java), but sorry I can’t send you (Zendesk engineers) a copy since I did sign an agreement when I received the software with the DoD (Navy) about its (NaCoDAE) use, such as not passing it to 3rd parties without their prior approval, not using it in any part for weaponry systems development that might target the US, etc, etc,… The NaCoDAE was freely available to researchers, but I think that it has been discontinued. The guy who lead the development of NaCoDAE is Dr David Aha (Google for his web site) and he is also a leading expert on CBR technology. David may be able to point out to you who are the local experts in Denmark on CBR.
Also for those CTO’s in the US who may be interested on CBR (for some curiosity or some exploratory reasons perhaps in possible technology implementations) , there is the CBR 8th International Conference (4 day conference) to be held on the 20th July to 23rd July 2009 in Seattle, Washington and both Dr. Watson & Dr. Aha are in the Program Committee.
I often attend these types of conferences when they are held here in New Zealand and I find it useful since sometimes as a software developer you might write something and you think that the method you used is the best until you sit in one of these conferences and listen to various presenters presenting their papers and you thought , bingo, there is that superior new method that I would have never come across on my own or know about it. This means that one can always get access to the latest cutting edge methodologies to get ahead of the competitions.
We use Zendesk at one of my portfolio companies (Tungle). We love it!
Kayako is better.
Zendesk is an awesome company.
Interesting. ServiceNow has had this for a few years now (I used to work at one of their competitors), but they’ve wrapped it as an ITIL compliant IT service management solution rather than pitching it as a “helpdesk.” Is Zendesk going to come in underneath their price point and try to eat their lunch?
Humm… Every time one of my sites are on KillerStartup I get a little email from them:
“This may seem a little spammy, but if you need a system to handle your support requests, give Zendesk a try, and let me know if I can help you in any regard.”
Great writeup, thanks Robin.
One small correction, just for the record: The US$ 0.5M of the previous round didn’t come from me alone but from a group of F&F and angel investors, including myself.
“I very much like the fact that the startup is so laser-focused on what they do and do well, instead of overloading the product”
Exactly. The temptation to include a real-time stream of social network updates and aggregation of “feeds” has been successfully fended off.
The next step would be to link this and related companies to providers of TR-069 systems to push the envelope of services beyond the traditional demarc.
http://en.wikip...org/wiki/TR-069
A lot of the providers of broadband aggregation platforms I speak with know that a service layer offering is the only way to survive as “boxes” move to ever thinner margins.
We have adopted Zendesk for our client services as well! Working out pretty nicely so far: http://leapfile.zendesk.com
Well deserved, they are a great team
Zendesk has great products with simplicity and powerful features. Unlike other CRV portfolio companies like Twitter or Geni, they have real business model.
Congrats to the Zendesk guys!..
MindTouch is a Zendesk customer. Moreover, the support team at MindTouch is so enamored with the service they’ve written a MindTouch extension to integrate the app.
Congrats Zendesk.
We use Zendesk and it is fantastic. We have tried many other help desk solutions before we stumbled upon Zendesk.
One word of warning. If you have customers in the People’s Republic of China, don’t expect them to get access as the PRC has blocked Zendesk’s IP. My assumption is that the Buddhist theme did not sit well with China and landed them on the black list for Green Dam.