Zendesk, a Danish startup that markets a nifty cloud-based, on-demand help desk system, has raised an undisclosed Series A round of funding from Charles River Ventures which it intends to use to expand its customer base worldwide, starting with the opening of new headquarters in Boston. That move makes sense because apparently over 70% of its customers are currently located in the United States.
The company declined to comment how much financing it secured from the VC firm exactly, but in a telephone conversation did say it was a fairly small round. Zendesk previously raised $500,000 in seed funding from PageFlakes co-founder Christoph Janz and other angel investors.
Zendesk is a web-based, SaaS-delivered help desk / support ticketing solution that gives companies, big or small, a simple way to manage incoming support requests from end customers. The aptly-named startup is delivering its hosted help desk system, which can be set up in just a matter of minutes, to a wide range of customers, including some familiar names like Rackspace, Condé Nast, MAXroam, Twitter, MSNBC and Scribd.
Zendesk comes with a free version, but it is fairly limited since you can only provide support for up to 50 end-users, plus you don’t get to brand the interface. There are six packages that you can subscribe to on a monthly basis (all come with a 30-day free trial), ranging from $19 for 1 support agent to $475 for 25 agents. Needless to say, these prices are way below what most traditional help desk system vendors dare charge for their products and services.
I very much like the fact that the startup is so laser-focused on what they do and do well, instead of overloading the product with unnecessary features or over-extending it to broader use (i.e. project management, to-do listings, etc.). That would put them up against some stiff competition and it seems to be carving out a nice niche for itself by focusing on end-user help desk management as it is, so that just wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Zendesk was also smart enough to have come right out the gate with an extensive API third-party developers and/or customers can use to plug the tool into other applications.
Bet we’ll here more from this company in the future.
