Freshworks acquires Joe Hukum, a platform for building own chatbots

The acquisition is Freshworks' eighth in under two years

Freshworks on Thursday announced the acquisition of Joe Hukum, a platform that enables businesses to build their own chatbots based on logical workflows. This acquisition is Freshworks' eighth in just under two years, and it further bolsters its capabilities to strengthen its business software suite. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

Freshworks Inc. is the parent company behind the suite of products which includes Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales and Freshcaller.

Freshworks had earlier acquired Chatimity and Frilp, key acquisitions that are enhancing neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) based Artificial Intelligence capabilities, while Joe Hukum's decision on tree based frameworks complete key capabilities to launch chatbot-powered solutions.

Joe Hukum was founded in July 2015 by Arihant Jain, Ajeet Kushwaha and Rahul Agarwal, who were also the founding team behind two of India's most prominent healthcare start-ups, HealthKart and 1mg.

Hukum's technology is powered by a robust decision tree framework that automates sales, services and support workflows, across various channels and user interfaces. 
 

Joe Hukum team will be responsible for building bots on top of existing Freshworks products, enabling workflow automations for demand generation, knowledge management and dynamic in-app self service.

"We are seeing strong interest from customers on how they want to leverage chatbots as they are looking for new ways to engage on their web and mobile channels," said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshworks. "As customer preferences shift from traditional phone tree based call center support, chatbots offer a new support experience, while essentially solving the age old challenge of triaging customer inquiries and routing that to the right support agent. These are still early days for chatbots, but Joe Hukum's innovative team and technology will help our clients better engage and support their customers," he added.

Each acquisition the company makes does not only bring new capabilities to the Freshworks suite of products but also brings innovation to the team.