After raising $55 million last year to build its business beyond its existing help desk services, today Freshworks (the parent company of Freshdesk) has made an acquisition to help it fill out that strategy. The company has acquired Joe Hukum, a startup out of India that offers a platform for businesses to build their own chatbots.
I’ve asked, but the companies are not revealing any terms of the deal. Joe Hukum, formerly known as Speedy, was originally focused more on building its own personal assistant / concierge app to help people order goods and services before pivoting to present the service as a platform for building bots for other businesses.
“Joe Hukum” is a reference to its pre-pivot incarnation: it is a phonetic transliteration of a Hindi phrase that translates as “as you wish.”
This is Freshworks’ eighth acquisition in two years, and comes in a small series of acquisitions it has made in the area of artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing: the other two acquisitions were of Chatimity and Frilp. Freshworks said it will use the tech and talent from the three startups to launch chatbot-powered Animated Marketing Video solutions.
Specifically, Joe Hukum’s knowledge tree coding has been built to automates sales, service and support workflows, and so the team from the startup — led by co-founders Arihant Jain, Ajeet Kushwaha and Rahul Agarwal — will be building bots on top of existing Freshworks products.
