Freshworks marks eighth buyout; chatbot platform startup Joe Hukum acquired

BENGALURU: Freshworks, US-headquartered provider of cloud-based business software, has acquired Joe Hukum, a platform that enables businesses to build their own chatbots based on logical workflows.

Founded in October 2010, Freshworks Inc. is backed by Accel, Tiger Global Management, CapitalG, and Sequoia Capital India. Freshworks has its HQ in San Bruno, California and global offices in India, UK, Australia, and Germany.

This acquisition marks Freshworks’ eighth in just under two years, as the company believes that it further bolsters capabilities to strengthen its business software suite.

Freshworks had earlier acquired Chatimity and Frilp, key acquisitions that are enhancing natural language programming (NLP) based Artificial Intelligence capabilities, while Joe Hukum’s decision tree based frameworks complete key capabilities to launch chatbot-powered solutions.

Joe Hukum was founded in July 2015 by Arihant Jain, Ajeet Kushwaha, and Rahul Agarwal, who were the founding team behind two of India’s most prominent healthcare startups, HealthKart and 1mg.

Joe Hukum’s technology is powered by a robust decision tree framework that automates sales, service, and support workflows, across various channels and user interfaces. The Joe Hukum team will be responsible for building bots on top of existing Freshworks products, enabling workflow automations for demand generation, knowledge management, and dynamic in-app self service.

“We are seeing strong interest from our customers on how they want to leverage chatbots as they are looking for new ways to engage with customers on their web and mobile channels,” said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshworks. “As customer preferences shift from traditional phone tree based call center support, chatbots offer a new support experience, while essentially solving the age old challenge of triaging customer inquiries and routing that to the right support agent. These are still early days for chatbots, but Joe Hukum’s innovative team and technology will help our clients better engage and support their customers.”

Consumers today spend the most amount of their time messaging, even more than what they do on social media. According to a Gartner report, by 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions.

“Consumer behaviour is drastically changing, perhaps faster than technology can keep up. Having helped build a successful e-commerce company in India, I realized customers are constantly looking for simpler ways to engage with businesses and chatbots offered a simple, yet powerful way to address this need,” said Arihant Jain, Co-founder of Joe Hukum. “As a founder, I could not have asked for a better outcome for Joe Hukum. Being a part of Freshworks is super exciting for all of us as it gives us a platform that provides us scale and reach and impact hundreds of thousands of customers."