Helpshift Raises $10M Series A Round Led By Intel Capital For Its Mobile Customer Service Solution

With an ever-increasing amount of commerce shifting to mobile apps, it’s also becoming increasingly important for companies to be able to offer customer service right from their apps. Helpshift, a CRM service that focuses on exactly this, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Intel Capital to capitalize on this trend.

Visionnaire Ventures and existing investors True Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round. In its previous round in late 2012, Helpshift raised $3.2 million, bringing its total funding to $13.2 million to date. Visionnaire’s managing partner Susan Choe will join the Helpshift board.

“We’ve realized we have something that most mobile companies could benefit from and the only challenge for us has been the ability to scale to meet the explosive demand,” said Helpshift CEO and co-founder Abinash Tripathy in a statement today. “This round of funding will enable us to attack each of these major mobile verticals and bring the benefits of Helpshift to thousands of app publishers.”

Tripathy also told me in an email earlier this week that most of the company’s growth so far has been organic. With the help of this new funding, the company plans to expand its sales and marketing team in San Francisco. He also notes that the company will continue to invest heavily on “building the end-to-end customer life cycle tools for mobile companies to provide the best customer experience and solve the customer retention issues they face.”

The company says its service has now been installed on over 150 million devices through the different developers that have integrated it into their apps. Helpshift counts Supercell, Glu Mobile and Flipboard among its customers, but as part of its plans to expand its service, the company will specifically target mobile commerce apps and on-demand services like taxi and food delivery.

Helpshift argues that embedding its service into existing apps can help reduce churn by about 40 percent. By being able to offer customer support right in the app, users can also reach out to developers before they leave a one-star review with a customer service request in an app store. In a world where most users only use an app for the first few days, anything that keeps them engaged for longer is also worth a try for most developers, so it’s no surprise the company has found a niche for its service.

While Helpshift launched as an iOS-only service, the company now also offers its solution for Android, as well as for Unity- and PhoneGap-based apps. Tripathy tells me the team is also looking closely at the Windows Phone platform and will soon launch an SDK for Apple’s new Swift language and Metal framework, too.

Prices for Helpshift start at $20/month for developers who have up to two agents on their support staff and expect about 20,000 monthly active users. More popular apps that surpass 100,000 monthly active users will need to subscribe to Helpshift’s $100/month Pro or $500/month Growth plan.