Estonian ecosystem starts 2024 with a big win. Zendesk, a leading customer service software company, has sealed an agreement to acquire Estonian startup Klaus, which builds an AI-powered quality management platform. The deal was announced on January 8th and will be completed in the first quarter of 2024.
Klaus’ software helps thousands of customer service agents at hundreds of enterprises to improve customer care centres’ quality and consistency. Using AI-automated analysis of 100% of interactions, it leads to focused insights and broad overviews. Klaus’s software It pulls in every text and audio customer interaction, considers dozens of factors that are likely to be problematic, and finds all the outlier conversations that need to be looked at in more detail.
Zendesk, which has a market capitalisation of over $9.62B, has highlighted that the acquisition will help to deliver consistent, high quality service across every channel and across both human and digital agents (bots) – all while unlocking the power of everyday customer interactions to increase loyalty. The bond between the two companies also started quite early, since Klaus has been in Zendesk’s Startup Incubator program.
Klaus was founded by Kair Käsper, Martin Kõiva and Egon Sale. Kõiva is an alumnus of Pipedrive, where he led the company’s customer support team. There he realised the best way to prevent bad customer interactions is to analyse previous ones, give agents regular check-ins and not rely too strictly on customer feedback. But he couldn’t implement these practices at scale because the tools didn’t exist. So in 2017, he teamed up with two co-founders (also ex-Pipedrive employees) to build Klaus.
Since then, the team raised over $20M across several rounds, including a €12M Series A deal in October 2022. This indicates that the deal range is probably in the tens of million euros.
For the Estonian ecosystem, which is built around collaborative efforts and successful exits, this will be another boost. “Although the journey will only accelerate from here, an avalanche of thanks is due to everyone who has helped us get to this point”, wrote the founders in their deal announcement.
Want to join the club and invest in the Estonian DeepTech sector? Read more on how DeepTech has become a hot topic in Estonia and fill out our e-Consulting form to get started with investing in Estonia.
