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 amount.
Last year Zendesk also acquired Tymeshift, a work team management tool, to incorporate into your product. The slowdown in the broader tech economy and falling valuations have certainly helped fuel a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the sector.
By the end, Klaus had raised a total of $19,3 million from investors including Global Founders Capital, Acton Capital, Icebreaker.vc, and Creandum.
Klaus started out focusing on creating customer service agents, but has morphed into a more comprehensive AI-powered QA platform (the company stated).
In 2019, co-founders Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva left employees of Estonian unicorn Pipedrive to launch a “conversation review and quality assurance tool for support teams.”
After gaining clients like Automattic, Wistia, and Soundcloud, they closed a $1,9 million seed funding led by Creandum.
Then in 2022, Klaus closed an equity round Serie A of 12 million euros (~$11,49 million) led by Acton Capital.
At that stage, Klaus was training algorithms Artificial Intelligence to perform tasks. These included automatically categorizing customer feedback, classifying conversations by attributes such as complexity, and performing sentiment analysis in multiple languages, thus rating the “quality” of conversations between customer and agent.
