Zendesk, an online helpdesk platform, announced this morning it’s secured $6 million in Series B venture funding from Benchmark Capital. Previous investor, Charles River Ventures participated pro-rata.
The startup says it is buiding the “help desk 2.0 movement.” If that sounds trendy to you, well it is, it’s web trendy. Like Google’s cloud applications, among other companies, Zendesk’s help platform functions entirely on the Web. Its customers need not install any sort of software – just basically load Zendesk up in their browser and everything functions up on the cloud.
One of Zendesk’s more popular clients is Twitter. Twitter uses Zendesk as its support engine. As a paying customer, Twitter is able to brand and customize its support page to whatever it needs and customers can comment and send messages to the Twitter support team. As much as this may look and feel like a Twitter page, the whole support system came as a package for Twitter powered by Zendesk. Some other Zendesk customers include Rackspace, Condé Nast, MSNBC and Scribd.
The help service comes at several different pricing points. Potential clients can start off with a 30- day-free trial and from there move to $19 a month per agent with an introductory price of $39 for the first three support agents. It’s also announced two new editions including $9 per month solo version for home-based businesses and a Plus version which runs at $99 for the first five agents, $39 for each IT agent after.
With growing clients like seen above, plus 1000 more, Zendesk has seen some rapid growth. Back in July of this year, Zendesk raised an undisclosed Series A from Charles River Ventures for US expansion – it opened an office in Boston. Originally founded in Denmark back in 2007, Zendesk says it will open a San Francisco office with this round of financing, while continuing to invest in developing new products.
