Freshdesk Takes Customer Support Social, Raises $1 Million From Accel Partners

PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- SaaS-based, social customer support startup Freshdesk today announced that it has secured US $1 Million in funding from global venture capital firm Accel Partners. The investment will be used to expand the product team and step up marketing and business development efforts.

"The future of customer support is on the cloud, and a good portion of it will happen on the company's Facebook and Twitter pages. Freshdesk also places particular emphasis on ease of use and intuitiveness, with the view that any company should be able to get it up and running in a few minutes," says Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshdesk.

Freshdesk was founded in 2010 by former Zoho executives, Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy. In March this year, a chance listing on AngelList drew enormous investor interest, which led to the Series A funding. As part of the investment, Shekhar Kirani from Accel Partners will now be joining Freshdesk's board of directors. The Series A Funding comes just as Freshdesk released a host of new features, including Facebook and Twitter integration, enabling businesses to take complete control of their customer service over social media.

Freshdesk aims to bridge a gap in the customer support software market where there were no quality options that were affordable for SMBs. Already integrated with Google Apps, the company plans to add more integrations with other cloud services in the coming months. Freshdesk now has customers in over 30 countries and is available in 6 languages.

"We were impressed by what Girish and the Freshdesk team have achieved in a relatively short span of time," said Shekhar Kirani. "A solid team, a product that customers love, significant traction and a big global market opportunity - all the ingredients for success are in place. SaaS is one of our key focus areas and Freshdesk is our first investment from the recently closed $155 million fund for India," he added.

"Freshdesk is lightyears ahead of traditional ticketing systems. With Freshdesk, we are able to delight our customers by supporting them wherever they happen to be - email, on the web, and across social networks," said Freshdesk customer John A. De Goes, CTO of ReportGrid, a cloud-based data analytics company.

This year, Freshdesk received widespread attention by winning the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge, beating more than 400 other startups. Freshdesk was also featured this month on Business Insider magazine's "The 10 hot Indian startups you need to watch."

About Freshdesk: Freshdesk is a SaaS-based social customer service platform that enables small and medium sized businesses to roll out a professional and modern customer support system. The pricing plans start from $9 per agent per month. Freshdesk's features include multi product support, knowledge base, self service portal, community forums and tools to leverage mainstream social media for customer support. For more information, please visit www.freshdesk.com or find us on Facebook - www.facebook.com/freshdesk or Twitter @freshdesk.

About Accel Partners: Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London and Bangalore, as well as in China via its partnership with IDG-Accel.

Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies, many of which have defined their categories, including 99designs, Actuate, AdMob, Agile Software, Alfresco, Angry Birds (Rovio), Atlassian, BBN, Bonobos, Braintree, Brightcove, Cloudera, ComScore, Diapers.com (Quidsi), Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Fusion-IO, Gameforge, GlamMedia, Groupon, Imperva, Infinera, Interwoven, IronPlanet, JBoss, Kayak, Lookout, Macromedia, metroPCS, MoPub, OPOWER, Polycom/PictureTel, Playfish, Portal Software, QlikTech,Rapt, Real Networks, Redback, Responsys, Riverbed, Spotify, Squarespace, SunRun, Trulia, UUNet, Veritas, Walmart.com, Webroot, Wonga, XenSource and Zimbra. In India, Accel has made investments in companies such as Babyoye, Cnergyis, enStage, Deeksha(Ace), Exclusively.in, Flipkart, HealthcareMagic, Kaatizone, Letsbuy, MuSigma, Myntra, Perfint, QwikCilver, Sconce, Vinculum and Virident.

SOURCE Accel Partners