Klaus – an Estonian-born startup that emerged in 2019 to help customer service agents – has been acquired by global customer service platform Zendesk for an undisclosed sum.
Last year Zendesk too acquired Tymeshift, a workforce management tool, folding into its product. We would be remiss not to mention that the downturn in the overall tech economy and falling valuations have certainly helped fuel a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the industry.
By the end, Klaus had raised a total of $19.3 million from investors including Global Founders Capital, Acton Capital, Icebreaker.vc and Creandum.
In a statement, Adrian McDermott, Zendesk’s Chief Technology Officer, said: “With Klaus as part of our WEM portfolio, we can empower businesses with the best AI-powered automated quality assurance on the market.”
Kair Käsper, co-founder of Klaus, added: “As AI increases the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only QA with AI can help companies keep up with rising customer expectations.”
Klaus started with a focus on building customer service agents, but has evolved into a more comprehensive AI-powered QA platform (company backed).
Back in 2019, co-founders Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva emerged from the employees of Estonian unicorn Pipedrive to launch a “chat overview and QA tool for support teams”.
After winning clients like Automattic, Wistia, and Soundcloud, they closed a $1.9 million funding round from Creandum.
Then in 2022, Klaus closed a €12 million (~$11.49 million) Series A equity round led by Acton Capital.
At that stage Klaus was training AI algorithms to perform tasks. These included automatically categorizing feedback from customers, classifying conversations by attributes such as complexity and performing sentiment analysis in different languages, thus rating the “quality” of customer-to-person conversations.
