Freshworks, one of the most sucessful Indian SaaS startup, has acquired Gurgaon-based Joe Hukum, a platform that helps businesses build their own chatbots. The financial details of the acquisition deal remains undisclosed.
As part of the deal, founders of the chat-bot startup — Arihant Jain, Ajeet Singh Kushwaha and Rahlu Agarwal will now be joining Freshworks. Their role in the company has not been revealed.
Joe Hukum announced on its website:
It’s been a short and crazy journey for us – from a small basement in Gurgaon to the plush Freshworks offices – a whirlwind of a journey lasting just over a year. We will be building bots on top of existing Freshworks products, enabling workflow automations for demand generation, knowledge management and dynamic in-app self service. We’re super proud to be a part of Freshworks and take this vision to their customers around the world.
Commenting on the acquisition, Girish Mathrubootham, founder and chief executive officer of Freshworks, said,
As customer preferences shift from traditional phone tree based call centre support, chat-bots offer a new support experience, while essentially solving the age old challenge of triaging customer inquiries and routing that to the right support agent. These are still early days for chat-bots, but Joe Hukum’s innovative team and technology will help our clients better engage and support their customers.
Joe Hukum was founded in July 2015 by ex-Healthkart employees Arihant Jain, Ajeet Singh Kushwaha and Rahul Agarwal. It is a chat-based order taking and fulfilment platform that offers services like local shopping, pick and drop, food, repairs, movie/ event tickets, travel, restaurant reservations, taxi, flowers, cakes, recharge, bill payments and groceries, among others.
After acquisition, the Joe Hukum team will be responsible for building bots on top of Freshworks’ existing products, enabling workflow automations for demand generation, knowledge management, and dynamic in-app self service.
The Gurgaon-based startup had raised seed funding from TracxnLabs besides entrepreneurs like payment firm Citrus’ founder Jitendra Gupta and Healthkart’s Prashant Tandon.
Joe Hukum marks Freshworks’ eighth acquisition so far. Earlier this year, it acquired Pipemonk, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup, for an undisclosed amount. Prior to that, the company had acquired Delhi-based Airwoot and Pune-based Framebench in 2016, among others.
Freshworks, which was previously known as Freshdesk, had raised Rs 366 crore in its Series F funding in November last year. The round was led by Sequoia Capital India and existing investor Accel Partners.