Salesforce acquires Assistly for $50 million

CRM for the social enterprise gets a big exit, rewarding Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures and others

Enterprise cloud computing giant Salesforce announced Thursday that it has acquired Assistly, a customer support help desk for the social enterprise, for $50 million in cash.

Completely Web-based, Assistly aggregates all your business’ customer service conversations in one place, whether they’re originating over email, phone, Facebook, Twitter or otherwise. It’s not just about interacting one-to-one, however, as clients can build out their own customized Knowledge Base to help customers answer their questions without support help.

The startup had raised nearly $6 million in venture capital across just two rounds, with the most recent being a $4 million Series B in January. Investors include Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Social Leverage, True Ventures and angel investor Kenny Van Zant.

Here’s just a short list of the many customers served by Assistly: Square, Yelp, One Kings Lane, Vimeo, Zaarly, StockTwits, Spotify, Grooveshark. The list goes on and on, with an emphasis on up and coming technology startups. Now a part of Salesforce, which has over 100,000 of its own customers, Assistly will undoubtedly see its audience expand beyond the tech sector.

“Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. “The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world.”

Though it is now a subsidiary of Salesforce, Assistly will remain unchanged in a few ways. Most notably, pricing is remaining the same. Additionally, the team will continue to operate as it has so far.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after the close of Dreamforce, the annual cloud computing conference hosted by Salesforce in its hometown of San Francisco. “Social” dominated the event, as the cloud computing company tries to assert itself as assuredly Web 2.0.

Assistly will aid in that endeavor.