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Print Edition StoriesWednesday, May 6, 2009
Charles River backs Zendesk’s expansion into Boston
By Mass High Tech staff
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Danish help desk software company Zendesk ApS has taken on an unspecified amount of Series A funding from Charles River Ventures, to expand operations and establish a new U.S. headquarters in Boston.
Zendesk, founded in 2007, uses a software as a service delivery platform to manage a company’s help desk system. According to officials, the company’s client roster has just climbed above 1,000 and includes Twitter, MSNBC.com and Rackspace Cloud.
Officials said that one of the driving reasons for planting a headquarters in the U.S. is that 70 percent of its customer base is here.
According to the company’s blog, Zendesk received $500,000 dollars in seed funding from angel investors in June of 2008. With this latest funding, Devdutt Yellurkar of CRV has joined the Zendesk board.
By using Web 2.0 technologies such as Ruby on Rails and tag-based categorization, Zendesk says it is creating a “help desk 2.0 movement” intended to make the customer support experience less painful to both companies and their customers.
Waltham-based Charles River Ventures has been busy on the personnel front in recent weeks. In April it added Stanford University professor and Google Inc. engineer Sebastian Thrun as a senior advisor. Just a few weeks prior it had also named former chairman and CEO of Sonus Networks Inc. Hassan Ahmed as a senior advisor. Sonus Networks is a former CRV portfolio company.
Founded in 1970, Charles River Ventures has approximately $2.1 billion under management. Among the companies in its portfolio are Cedar Point Communications Inc. of New Hampshire and Nantero Inc. of Woburn. CRV has had its share of successful tech industry exits, including the July 2007 IPO of Marlborough-based Netezza Corp. (NYSE: NZ) for $108 million, and the September 2007 sale of Lowell’s Acopia Networks Inc. for $210 million.
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