Freshdesk buys former Google execs' social chat platform Chatimity

San Francisco- and Chennai-based Freshdesk Inc, which provides cloud-based customer engagement software, has acquired Chatimity Software Pvt. Ltd, a social chat platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

"With their focus on artificial intelligence and chatbots, the Chatimity team, now part of Freshdesk, has already started to create a scalable customer engagement chat platform that is future ready," said Girish Mathrubootham, founder and chief executive of Freshdesk, in a statement on Tuesday.

Chatimity was built to enable user interactions and improve engagement for its three million users. The acquisition is Freshdesk's sixth in a little more than a year and is in line with the company's bid to enhance product development and capabilities within the chat platform.

Bengaluru-based Chatimity was founded in May 2011 by former Google executives Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy. They worked together on Google Music Search before starting Chatimity. The team was based out of Bengaluru and was part of Google Startup Launchpad and one of the early incubatees of the Global INcubation SERVices (GINSERV).

At Freshdesk, the Chatimity team will work toward enhancing the company's live chat offerings. Chatimity's multipurpose AI-based bot, MITI, can hold conversations with thousands of users in real time. The company has also prototyped several interactive chat bots, including one for a travel website. 

 "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," said Thakur.

Freshdesk has struck a series of acquisitions over the past year.

The company purchased Faridabad-based Memeticlabs Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates social media listening and analytics platform Airwoot, in April and acquired Pune-based visual collaboration platform Framebench two months before. Freshdesk bought in-app customer support platform Konotor in December, social recommendation platform Frilp in October 2015 and video chat software 1Click.io in August last year.

Freshdesk was founded in 2010 by former Zoho employees Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. The SaaS-based startup provides customer support solutions. Its flagship product, Freshdesk, allows organisations to support customers through email, phone, websites, mobile apps, forums and social media. The startup is backed by Tiger Global Management, Accel Partners, and Google Capital.