Zendesk Secures Funding For SaaS Help Desk System, Heads To The U.S.
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.