Microsoft, Salesforce lead $23m round for India's Helpshift
Microsoft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures have led a $23 million Series B round for Indian customer service platform Helpshift.
Helpshift will use the capital to build out its core mobile app chat service, which it claims is used by more than a thousand app publishers and is deployed on over 1.3 billion devices worldwide. It will also pursue additional functionality, including analytics services to identify common themes and issues in its chat platform, voice-based services, and a desktop app.
The company was founded in India and its product team is based there; its sales and business development teams are based in California. Its VC backers include Intel Capital, which led a $10 million Series A round in 2014, with participation by Visionnaire Venures, True Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. The latter two firms committed $3.2 million in Helpshift's 2012 seed round. All of the company's previous investors committed to the Series B round.
Helpshift's product is meant to provide a more convenient way for mobile app users and developers to resolve issues than email-based support. The software allows customers to conduct support chats within the app; the start-up's corporate clients include Microsoft, Zynga, Western Union and WordPress.
"When we launched Helpshift with the premise that mobile customers deserve a much better experience for customer support, we were told by many that the email experience was working," Helpshift said in a blog post. "Today, companies like Uber are moving away from email-based support to in-app messaging, validating what we've always believed: mobile customer support should live on mobile."
Salesforce Ventures is the investment arm of US-based customer relationship management software developer Salesforce; it seeks investment opportunities in innovative enterprise technology developers. Its Asian portfolio includes Japanese business contact management software developer Sansan and user interface designer Goodpatch.
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