Freshdesk acquires social chat platform Chatimity

Freshdesk, one of the largest SaaS-based startups has announced its sixth acquisition within 14 months. The Cloud-based customer support solution provider has acquired Chatimity, a social chat platform, which will help the company to scale chat infrastructure and build chat products.

The deal details, as usual, are yet to be disclosed by the Company. However, according to a spokesperson, it is a cash + equity deal.

Chatimity, founded in 2011 by Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy, develops artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology to enable user interactions and improve engagement.

Tarkeshwar Thakur, Co-founder and CEO of Chatimity, said, "Our team was able to get a glimpse of what Freshdesk was already working on and we immediately knew that our team and technology would complement and accelerate product development at Freshdesk with a strong focus on AI and chat tech. Delivering a top-notch customer experience over chat continues to be a challenge for many companies, a problem we intend to solve with some of the next-gen chat products we are building at Freshdesk."

The multipurpose AI-based bot from the company — MITI, uses a combination of NLP (Natural Language Processing), state machines and AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to hold conversations across thousands of users in real time.

Girish Mathrubootham, Founder, and CEO of Freshdesk said, "People want a fast, personalized response. Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge."

The Chatimity team has already moved to Chennai and joined Freshdesk, where they will work towards enhancing the company’s live chat offerings.

In December last year, Freshdesk acquired Konotor, which helps businesses chat with their consumers within apps. Airwoot, a machine learning startup was acquired in April 2016; Framebench, a file collaboration platform in February; Frilp, a social recommendation app in October, and 1CLICK.io, a video chat platform in August.