Freshdesk acquires Chatimity to expand AI chat offerings

Cloud-based customer support platform Freshdesk that enables companies to provide multichannel support via phone, email, chat and social media, has acquired Chatimity, that offers Chat-as-a-Service for mobile applications and uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology. According to Business Standard, this is Freshdesk’s sixth acquisition in just over a year as it is aiming to expand its product portfolio and proficiency within the chat platform and beyond that. As part of Freshdesk, Chaitimity will be working on building the company’s chat offerings. The cost of the deal remains undisclosed. Bengaluru-based Chaitmity was founded by Tarkeshwar Thakur and Aravind Murthy, former employees of Google and they started this social chat application with an aim of helping people discover others based on locality and interests and it raised to over 3 million users across various platforms. Chatimity claims that to achieve this, it built a lot of chat tech and employed ML and AI solutions like a social reputation system for automated community moderation and spam detection. It also built a chatbot, named MITI, that in addition to making casual chat, conducted games, and kept users hooked. Economic Times quoted Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and Chief Executive, Freshdesk, “Chat will play an important role in the future of communication for customer service but scaling that infrastructure continues to be a challenge. 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.” In the month of June this year, Freshdesk launched a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution called, Freshsales which the company claims that the new CRM works best for “high-velocity” environment as it can accomplish multiple jobs such as lead, deal and account management; email and phone integration; user behavior tracking; lead scoring; a visual sales pipeline; and reporting. Freshdesk claims to already have a chat platform named as Freshchat which in beta right now and it claims this platform as intelligent live chat product that helps find interested visitors on website and convert them into customers. With this acquisition, Freshdesk will be able to make enhancements in its existing chat platform by adding AI and machine learning technology to it. According to ZDNet, today many companies in CRM space are investing big bucks chatbot platforms and technologies. Salesforce introduced LiveMessage, a platform where representatives can interact with customers with multiple messaging apps. Oracle also launched a bot platform and similarly LinkedIn also has its own bot assistant. Tarkeshwar Thakur, Co-founder and CEO, Chatimity stated, “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.”