Customer service giant Zendesk plans $150M IPO, acquires live chat startup Zopim

Zendesk, maker of customer service software, just announced its plans to go public and raise as much as $150 million.

The news, revealed in a standard S-1 form, follows IPO interest from numerous tech heavyweights, including Box and Dropbox.

Directly after announcing its IPO plans, the customer service company shared that it has acquired Singapore-based Zopim, a startup that offers live chat software for customer service purposes. The terms of that deal were not disclosed.

Zendesk, founded in 2007 in Denmark, also revealed its revenues for the past three calendar years in the filing. In 2013, the company earned more than $72 million — $47.5 million in gross profit, according to the filing. Zendesk nearly doubled its revenues year over year for the past three years. According to the S-1 filing, Zendesk has not yet set an initial public offering price per share.

Zendesk retains a strong user base among small and medium-sized businesses but reports in its filing that it has “a history of losses” and expects its “revenue growth rate to decline.” According to the company’s most recent stats, Zendesk has over 40,000 customer accounts, with users in 140 countries. Zendesk competes with other help desk providers like Saleforce-owned Desk, Freshdesk, and Kayako.

We have incurred net losses in each year since our inception, including net losses of $24.4 million and $22.6 million in the years ended December 31, 2012 and 2013, respectively. We had an accumulated deficit of $64.5 million at December 31, 2013. From the year ended December 31, 2012 to the year ended December 31, 2013, our revenue grew from $38.2 million to $72.0 million, which represents an annual growth rate of 88%. We expect that our revenue growth rate will decline over time.

This particular investor warning follows many standard disclaimers, as usual in S-1 filings.

Zendesk plans to list under the stock symbol “ZEN.”