Customer help desk management provider Zendesk today announced that it is opening a new office in Denmark and is teaming up with nearly a dozen startup incubators around the world to give its customer support software.
The company is working with the likes of Y Combinator and Seedcamp to give those attending startups its software for free for a year. Zendesk operates a Web-based help desk service that lets companies track customer complaints across most of the web. It’s one of a number of startups trying to bring the ideas behind consumer-facing technology like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise space.
“We were once a startup and we know how important it is to get help from those other companies whenever [you can] get it,” Zack Urlocker, the company’s chief operating officer, told VentureBeat. “Incubators weren’t around when we were getting started, and now that they are, they’re one of the best ways to get an idea off the ground, so naturally we wanted to work with them.”
Some of Zendesk’s largest customers are graduates from those same incubators. The company now has 10,000 customers, including the likes of superstar startups Groupon, Airbnb and Dropbox. Erply, another major customer, is a graduate of Europe’s Seedcamp — another incubator Zendesk is working with.
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“It isn’t a play for new customers,” Urlocker said. “We just wanted to throw some help out.”
The company now has more than 100 employees, and while it’s based in San Francisco, Calif., it has strong ties to Copenhagen, Denmark. That’s where the company is born and where the company has a “fan base,” Urlocker said. There’s a lot of talent there that the company would like to tap into, and it already has a large number of connections there thanks to Zendesk chief executive Mikkel Svane’s history in the city, Urlocker said.
Zendesk is part of a number of new-age venture-backed enterprise startups that are bringing consumer tech to the enterprise. The company recently closed its third round of fundraising, worth $19 million. It also closed a $6 million fundraising round in August 2009.
