Why We Invested in Helpshift
By Phil Black, October 30, 2012
The good news: whatever it is, there is likely “an app for that.”
The bad news: apps don’t always work the way they should, sometimes providing more headaches than help.
Enter Helpshift, an innovative SaaS company creating a mobile-specific customer support solution to improve user experience, expedite bug-fixes and ultimately help app developers retain users. Helpshift provides developers with a native SDK that integrates with mobile apps to provide seamless, in-app customer support. The best apps allow users to “live” in the experience, and it is a huge pain point when something isn’t working. Customer service has to evolve beyond its traditional model to address the mobile world and its attendant pain points, and Helpshift is creating an entirely new customer service model for today’s mobile ecosystem.
Co-Founder Abinash Tripathy is passionate about improving customer service technology, and he and his co-Founder Baishampayan Ghose (“BG”) have developed a fabulous product. Abinash and BG fall right within True’s Founder sweet spot—promising entrepreneurs who are building for the markets of the future. We love Helpshift not only because of its strong founding team, but also because we see a huge opportunity in the enterprise, infrastructure and SaaS spaces, and believe the trend of innovation in these areas is going to grow at an exponential pace.
As open source software and cloud computing platforms drastically drive down the costs of development for startups in the enterprise and infrastructure arenas, a new wave of enterprise innovators is emerging: companies that can build, scale and deliver quality products—and produce revenue—in a far more capital efficient manner than ever before. We recognized and invested in this trend beginning in 2008, and over 50% of our active portfolio today are infrastructure or enterprise companies, including Urban Airship, Puppet Labs, Piston Cloud, Apcera, Message Bus, and most recently Social Pandas and Helpshift.
We see a green field opportunity in native mobile app customer support, and Helpshift is now poised to become the leader in a young, but rapidly growing, market.
Abinash, BG and team Helpshift, welcome to True Ventures!
Read more about Helpshift in VatorNews and TechCrunch.