SaaS-based Freshworks acquires chatbot startup Joe Hukum

Chennai-based Freshworks seems to be on acquisition spree. After taking over seven new startups within 2 years, now it has acquired Joe Hukum, a platform that helps businesses to build their own chatbots.

The company didn't disclose the amount involved in the deal as per ET report.

Founded in 2010, Freshworks is a new avatar of Freshdesks, a software as a service (SaaS) company headquartered at San Bruno, California. It is backed by Accel Partners, Tiger Global Management, CapitalG, and Sequoia Capital India.

Considered as one of the most well funded SaaS start-ups, Freshworks has a global presence and more than 100,000 enterprise customers includes Honda, Hugo Boss, Bridgestone , Toshiba, Cisco, Swiggy, Jaguar, Land Rover, 3M, and Lenskart to name a few.

On the other side, Joe Hukum(GogetSpeedy Technologies Pvt. Ltd) was founded in July 2015 by Arihant Jain, Ajeet Kushwaha, and Rahul Agarwal, former co-founders of Healthtech start-up HealthKart and 1mg.

The gurugram-based chatbot startup has managed to bag a long list of clients which includes IRCTC, BookMyTrain, Droom, PolicyBazaar, Citrus Payments, Safexpress, Knowlarity, HealthKart and 1mg, among others.

After the acquisition, the team at Joe Hukum will join Freshworks. “Being a part of Freshworks is super exciting for all of us as it gives us a platform that provides us scale and reach and impact hundreds of thousands of customers,” Joe Hukum co-founder Jain said in statement.

So far, Freshworks had raised about $150 million including $55 million in Series F million led by Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners last year.

Commenting on latest funding, Girish Mathrubootham, founder of Freshworks said, “As customer preferences shift from traditional phone tree-based call centre support, chatbots offer a new support experience, while solving the age-old challenge of triaging customer inquiries and routing that to the right support agent.”

Freshworks competes with the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce, and in some of its product suites, even Zoho and has offices in the US, London, Sydney, and Berlin.

Freshworks has made a series of acquisition which includes Airwoot-a platform offering customer service solution on social media, Framebench-an online collaboration platform Konotor-a messaging app Frilp-an online platform that helps users discover a shop or service, 1CLICK-a video, voice, and text chat platform, Chatimity-an AI-based chatbot platform and Pipemonk-a data integration platform was the latest product in its list.