Freshdesk acquires Chatimity to make enterprise bots

Customer support software company Freshdesk announced today that it has acquired chat app and bot creator Chatimity. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Chatimity is a chat app with 3 million registered users that makes business-to-consumer bots and A.I.-powered bots like MITI, which uses natural language processing to automate thousands of conversations at once.

Along with the company’s technology, the Chatimity team of seven will join Freshdesk to help build and grow a bot infrastructure and develop chatbots for support, benefits, and sales.

“This is part of our broader strategy to make sure we are bringing the next level of innovation in the customer support world. A.I. and chatbots are going to disproportionately benefit customer service, and we see that,” Freshdesk president Dilawar Syed told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “We wanted to make sure that we are upping the game, [that] we are ready to respond to that demand in the market by having an infrastructure that can scale quickly for our customers.”

It’s been a busy few weeks for business-related bots.

In CRM, earlier this month, Salesforce launched LiveMessage, a way for businesses to chat with customers across chat platforms. Oracle launched a bot platform, and LinkedIn has created an assistant bot.

Microsoft has announced plans to create its own enterprise bots, and the Microsoft Bot Framework recently made an integration into Howdy, the de facto framework used to build Slack bots.

Freshdesk already has a standalone chat product, as well as a mobile in-app support product, but Freshdesk felt Chatimity was necessary in order to scale.

“We have interesting assets, but we’ve found that in order for us to go to the next level as far as bringing intelligence to it, this team will help us escalate our roadmap. In the long run, this is helping us become more intelligent as a platform,” Syed said.

Freshdesk is based in San Bruno, Calif. and was created in 2011. The company has more than 80,000 customers.