City startup buys a social recommendation platform
Chennai
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Chennai-based Freshdesk, a cloud-based customer support company , announced acquisition of social recommendation platform Frilp on Friday . This comes close on the heels of its earlier acquisition of 1CLICK, a video chat software.
Freshdesk was set up by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy in 2010. Since then, the company has seen rapid adoption from small and midsized businesses globally . Apart from its flagship customer support product and Mobihelp, an in-app support for mobile apps, the company offers enterprise clients an internal IT helpdesk, Freshservice. The company counts enterprises like Avast Antivirus, Bridgestone, Verizon Wireless and 3M among its clients. Garnering more than 50,000 customers across 145 countries in less than five years, it is touted to be one of Chennai's fastest growing startups.
In April, Freshdesk announced a US $50 million round of financing led by Tiger Global, and joined by Accel Partners and Google Capital. With this round of funding and its growing customer base, Freshdesk has been looking for ways to leverage platforms with large user bases to help drive conversations online. The earlier acquisition of 1CLICK and now Frilp will help Freshdesk deliver their solutions in a seamless manner across media, including mobile.
Frilp which stands for friend's help, was set up in 2013 in Chennai by a group of five entrepreneurs, including Senthil Kanthaswamy , Shyam Anandaraman, Raja Jayaraman, Anish Deenadayalan and Aravind Gopalan. Kanthaswamy , Anandaraman and Gopalan are alumni of College of Engineering in Guindy . The startup was incubated at iAccelerator in IIM-Ahmedabad. Frilp uses a proprie tary logarithm to help users discover a shop or service through their friends and people they trust. Frilp raised their first round of funding of US $500,000 from investors including Mathrubootham and former Groupon executive Deva Kannan. Within a period of two years, Frilp has gathered one lakh users on its platform.
Following the announcement on its acquisition by Freshdesk, Frilp announced on its website that it will shut down the app in its current form and launch new ones where other companies can use the platform. According to the deal, all 19 employees of Frilp have joined Freshdesk's development centre in Chennai. Financial details backing the transaction were not disclosed.
