Today, San Francisco,CA-based Helpshift is announcing the successful close of a $23 million Series B round of funding. Launched in 2012, Helpshift offers native, in-app, mobile customer support, and has since expanded to reach all major platforms including web and email.
Their platform allows app owners to add a messaging service directly in the app, avoiding the need to exit to a secondary system. The round is led by Microsoft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, with participation from their prior investors.
“Helpshift has been a great partner for Microsoft and our investment today represents our confidence in their messaging-based approach to customer service, as we hold a shared value of providing the seamless experience customers want,” said Microsoft Ventures Corporate Vice President Nagraj Kashyap.
With their latest round of funding, the company plans to further advance their platform and expand their team across the board. According to Helpshift CEO and cofounder Abinash Tripathy, the company will focus on their vision of autonomous customer support where machine learning will be used to automate large parts of the customer support workflow. This will result in improved interactions for both companies and customers that use the solution.
“Our continued growth is a direct reflection of a capital-intensive support industry that’s ready for change. Consumers are tired of waiting for support agents to get back to them, and companies are tired of staffing expensive support teams to answer common, or even predictable, problems in the first place. People want immediate help, wherever they are, especially when using mobile applications,” said Tripathy. “This is the year we champion a new model of support, one that’s better for both consumers, as well as the companies serving them.”
According to a company statement, Helpshift currently has thousands of customers, some of which include Microsoft, Virgin Media, Zynga, WordPress, and Flipboard.
“CRMs were never designed with end users in an Enterprise in mind. We design our products like consumer companies as our mobile in-app SDK is used by billions of end users today. We are obsessive about product design to make it a delight to use,” said Tripathy. “We are deeply engineering oriented and look for technical excellence in people that are long term orientated and can play well on a team. We are obsessed about making our customers and their end-users successful.”
Along with the new round of funding the company plans to make several new hires. In their San Francisco headquarters they will bring on marketing and sales team members, and they will hire product managers, designers, and software engineers in Pune, India.
To date, Helpshift has raised a combined $36.2 million across three funding rounds.