Helpshift Leads CRM Industry Into Post-PC Era

After weeks of rather anemic activity, investment pacing picked up quite a bit into the period that ended November 25. No more $140 million weeks, as this time around the tally stood at just under $900 million. The preponderance of activity, of course, stood within FinTech, and with roughly 93 percent of that amount.

A few large deals held disproportionate sway over the bump up we’ve just seen for our Investment Tracker. In fact, there were only two triple-digit announcements for the period. The biggest transaction came as Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank closed on a $600 million syndicated loan. This means that traditional banking carried quite a bit of weight within the week’s investment activity.

Within payments processing, Stripe raised $150 million, with an implied valuation of more than $9 billion. The round had been co-led by Alphabet’s investing arm, along with existing investor Stripe backer General Catalyst.

Helpshift Leads The CRM Industry Toward A Post-PC Era

San Francisco area startup Helpshift is working to revolutionize the customer support industry through an enterprise-level, app-based customer support platform.

Last week, Helpshift announced that Cisco Investments had joined its Series B funding round, following previous investors Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

“Helpshift is here to lead the way for the CRM industry in the post-PC era,” said cofounder and CEO Abinash Tripathy. He has over 20 years of experience in enterprise tech and CRM industries.

Prior to Helpshift, Tripathy was responsible for conceptualizing and delivering the world’s first IP-based voicemail/unified communication, mobile photo messaging (in Japan) and MMS products to the market.

In 2011, Tripathy saw that the future of customer support was on mobile.

“Brands in a rapidly growing mobile world needed real-time, intuitive tools in order to solve user problems in-app, in real time,” he said. “My cofounder, Baishampayan Ghose, and I discovered that no other CRM solution focused on mobile first, so we decided to create it.”

Among Helpshift’s innovations to the CRM space, said Tripathy, are push notifications, self-service technology optimized for native mobile, desktop and web apps, and messaging technology enabling customers to communicate with customer support — all in-app.

“Mobile is the way the future is going, and people will use it to access everything in their life. And apps are where people spend their time on mobile. Helpshift’s contribution to the industry is bringing huge efficiencies to the process of customer service,” Tripathy said, “and creating happy customers for large and small brands across all industries — gaming, eCommerce, IoT, productivity, digital entertainment.”

To date, Helpshift has raised more than $38.2 million from its investors.

“The original Series B was first announced in June of 2016. What we continue to hear from our investors is that they too see a worldwide need for in-app care, which has the power to scale for millions of users,” said Tripathy.

“Email and call centers are becoming much harder to scale and maintain,” he added. “Apps are becoming more of a day-to-day for users, and people are becoming more comfortable reaching out to brands for their needs through apps that help them much quicker than legacy systems ever could.”

Helpshift employs 123 people worldwide, including San Francisco and Pune, India. Helpshift is installed on 2 billion devices worldwide and powers customer support for major brands including Microsoft, Viacom, Virgin Media and WordPress, among others. Helpshift serves over 400 million mobile customers each month.

And with the new funding, Tripathy said Helpshift is planning to expand its teams across multiple fronts.

“Our Series B funding will help us expand our team across R&D, sales and marketing,” he said. “With the additional funding from Cisco Investments, we are looking to help the entire contact center industry transition from being reactive to proactive while driving higher customer satisfaction and lowering cost.”