Talkdesk Inc., a startup whose software helps companies run their contact centers more efficiently, today disclosed that it has closed a $230 million funding round valuing it at more than $10 billion.

The new valuation is more than three times what Talkdesk was worth after its previous capital raise a year ago. The startup’s total outside funding now stands at $498 million. 

San Francisco-based Talkdesk provides a contact center platform that enables customer service teams to field support calls and helps salespeople sign up new clients. The platform performs tasks such as routing a support ticket from a user to the customer service agent best equipped to answer their inquiry. Talkdesk counts more than 1,800 companies as customers, including IBM Corp., Canon Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd. 

The startup has developed a set of artificial intelligence features to make customer service teams more productive. Companies using Talkdesk’s platform can set up an AI chatbot to answer frequent questions. For more complex inquiries that have to be directed to a customer service representative, Talkdesk’s AI algorithms generate suggestions to help agents find the best way of answering the user’s request. 

If a shopper inquires about the availability of a certain type of product, Talkdesk can automatically surface all the items in a company’s catalog that match the criteria. The startup says that its automation features enable customer service teams to find needed information more quickly and consequently answer customer requests faster. In the interest of further saving time, Talkdesk says that its AI also automatically finds any follow-up actions representatives should take after a support ticket is resolved.

The startup spent a part of the nearly $500 million it has raised from investors on building analytics tools to complement its AI feature set. By analyzing historical data about contact center activity, Talkdesk enables managers to identify the times when a company can expect a surge of customer support tickets and prepare accordingly.

The startup will use the $230 million round it announced today to continue adding new features. “We hire the best talent and employ the highest percentage of engineers of any company in the contact center market,” Talkdesk founder and Chief Executive Officer Tiago Paiva wrote in a post on the startup’s blog. “More than 50% of our employees are dedicated to research and development, and 50% of our investment is always in R&D.”

The funding round may also set the stage for a potential initial public offering in the future. This morning, Talkdesk announced that it has appointed Sydney Carey as its first chief financial officer. Carey was previously the CFO of multiple publicly traded enterprise software companies including cybersecurity provider Zscaler Inc. and MongoDB Inc., which develops a popular database of the same name.

The contact center software segment where Talkdesk competes is a more crowded market than when the startup launched a decade ago. In recent years, both Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC added contact center platforms to their respective public clouds, complete with AI features for automating common tasks. Talkdesk also faces competition from a number of fellow startups.

Given that both AWS and Google roll out new features to their cloud platforms at a high frequency, Talkdesk’s approach of dedicating more than half its workforce to research and development will likely continue to be a valuable strategy going forward. The startup also plans to invest a portion of the new funding round in growing its international presence.

The round was provided by a group of investors that included Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group. They were joined by returning Talkdesk backers Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital. 

Photo: Talkdesk