Freshdesk Snags $31M in Series D Funding To Continue Building Customer Support Services

freshdesk

Freshdesk, the customer support as a service company with 23,000 customers, raised $31 million in Series D funding today in a round led by Tiger Global Management, with Accel Partners and Google Capital also contributing.

The funding is significant, especially given its total to date was $44 million and the highest amount the company had received in any previous round was $7 million last November led by Accel Partners.

Customer-support issues come in through a variety of channels, including phone, web, email and chat, as well social channels, among others. Freshdesk helps manage and prioritize the problems and distribute them to reps.

One of the ways the company tries to engage customer-support reps is by gamifying their applications. They give rewards for resolving the most tickets or for the rep who has the highest first-call resolution in a month.

What’s more, Freshdesk has built-in integration with a number of programs such as Salesforce.com, Basecamp, Constant Contact and many others, so that you can integrate Freshdesk directly into the workflow of these other programs.

One of the reasons VCs are taking notice, says CEO Girish Mathrubootham, is that they have grown dramatically over the last two quarters, landing  over 10,000 new customers during that time. He also says it helps that they launched a new product called FreshService in January that provides the same type of service as Freshdesk but that is aimed at in-house IT support.

Mathrubootham told me that the company has plans for additional products in the future, and he believes the fact that they are experiencing growth and aren’t a one-trick pony certainly is helping from a funding standpoint.

Freshdesk is in a crowded market with some big competition, including Zendesk, which went public in May after raising more than $85 million in cash. Salesforce has a stake in this space as well with its Desk.com product, but Mathrubootham says there is plenty of room for competition. He knows they aren’t alone,  but says it’s a big market and they can all find their place.

Freshdesk customers include Hugo Boss, The Atlantic and UNICEF.