Chennai start-up secures $1mn series-A funding

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. We also placed particular emphasis on ease of use and intuitiveness, with the view that any company should be able to get Freshdesk 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. 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".