Talkdesk, a startup that makes software used by companies to operate contact centres efficiently, announced on Thursday that after a $230 million funding round, it has reached a valuation of more than $10 billion.
This new valuation is more than three times what the company was worth after the last capital raise a year ago. Currently, the total outside funding channelled to Talkdesk comes in at $498 million.
The San-Francisco-based company provides a contact centre software used by customers service teams to take support calls and help salespeople get new clients.
The Talkdesk platform
The platform performs tasks that include routing a support ticket from a user to the customer service agent to provide relevant answers. Talkdesk has more than 1,800 companies as its clients, including Fujitsu, IBM, and Canon.
The startup develops a set of artificial intelligence features that increase customer service teams’ productivity. Companies using the platform can set up an AI chatbot that answers frequently asked questions.
If a shopper asks about a specific product, Talkdesk automatically surfaces all the items in a company’s catalog that fit the description provided by the customers.
How Talkdesk plans to use the new funds
The startup says it spent some of the $500 million raised from investors to build analytics tools that complement the AI sets. Analysis of historical data about contact centre activity by the platform enables managers to identify when a company can expect a surge in support tickets, allowing time to prepare.
Talkdesk will use the $230 million it raised on Thursday on the addition of new features. The founder and CEO, Tiago Paiva, wrote in a post on the company’s blog that the plan is to hire the best talent and employ a higher percentage of engineers than its peers/competitors.