Freshdesk acquires Bengaluru-based 1Click

Freshdesk is exploring more acquisitions to add complementary technologies and capabilities to its software-as-a-service products, reports Tech in Asia

Girish Mathrubootham, founder of hot Indian start-up Freshdesk, told Tech in Asia recently that a transformation is under way in how businesses think of customer support. He said it’s going to be more pro-active in the sense that businesses will connect with customers through multiple channels without waiting for them to reach out with a problem.
 

Today, Google Capital-backed Freshdesk made a big move towards making that happen. It announced its first acquisition: Bengaluru-based 1Click, whose software enables live video chat and co-browsing. These features will now become a part of Freshdesk’s software to enhance its capacity for customer interactivity. 
 

Last month, software review platform G2 Crowd rated Freshdesk ahead of its main American rivals Zendesk and Desk in customer satisfaction. The 1Click acquisition provides fuel to Freshdesk – which is from Chennai, now headquartered in San Francisco – to consolidate this lead by letting support agents see the customer’s screen and interact with it in real­time, helping them resolve issues more easily.
 

Co-browsing, which allows a customer and a support executive to jointly navigate web pages, is hard to implement because of security protocols in browsers. 1Click, founded in 2012 and incubated in the entrepreneurial centre of IIM, Bengaluru, has been working on relatively new technologies to enable co-browsing and other forms of live visual communication. It was backed by early stage VC fund Blume Ventures and angel investor Naru Narayanan from the Chennai Angels.
 

The acquisition of 1Click comes months after Freshdesk closed a $50 million series E round of funding. It continues to grow its global customer base which has now crossed the 50,000 mark. The company says it is exploring more acquisitions to add complementary technologies and capabilities to Freshdesk’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) products.

This has been sourced from Tech in Asia. You can access the article here.