Assistly, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of instant customer-service help desk built for the cloud, has been acquired by enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM] for approximately $50m in cash.
Founded in 2009 by CEO Alex Bard, COO Gary Benitt, CTO Brad Birnbaum, and CAO Jeremy Suriel, Assistly allows small companies and emerging businesses, including Instagram, Klout, One Kings Lane, Spotify and Square, to set up and deliver social customer-service in minutes, manage service cases and engage with customers in real time over a range of channels – including Facebook, Twitter, Web chats, e-mail and phone – all from one interface. Investors include Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, salesforce.com, Social Leverage and True Ventures (see related news).
With Assistly, salesforce.com can extend its customer-service help desk application to small and emerging businesses. As stated by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, of salesforce.com, the acquisition put the company “at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world”.
The advantages for Assistly were summed up by CEO Alex Bard: “As part of salesforce.com and the Service Cloud family, Assistly can continue to deliver and improve one of the world’s most-innovative customer-service applications. For our customers, this will be an unbeatable combination“.
For more details on the acquistion, read the company’s blog (http://www.assistly.com/blog/assistly-for-salesforce)
FinSMEs
24/09/2011
Related News
05/01/2011: Assistly Raises $3M in Funding 05/01/2011 (read here)
13/05/2010: Assistly Raises $2.2M (read here)