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 workforce management tool, to be incorporated into your product. It would be remiss of us not to mention that the slowdown in the broader tech economy and falling valuations have certainly helped fuel a wave of M&A 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.
In a statement, Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer at Zendesk, 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 interaction, only ai-powered quality control can help companies keep up with rising expectations. of customers”.
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 a €12 million (~$11.49 million) Series A equity round led by Acton Capital.
At that stage, Klaus was training artificial intelligence algorithms 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.
