by Josh Stein
DFJ is excited to announce that we led a $15M Series A financing for Talkdesk.
If you haven’t yet heard of Talkdesk, I’m thrilled to be the one putting it on your radar — it is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies we’ve ever seen. And it’s a fascinating example of how a new core “stack” of infrastructure platforms are systematically reducing the frictions to growth. These platforms are enabling visionary entrepreneurs to bring scale to their businesses at a fraction of the cost — and more importantly, in a fraction of the time — that was required just a few short years ago.
Talkdesk’s founding story is a compelling one. Tiago Paiva, Talkdesk’s charismatic co-founder and CEO, a recent graduate from Portugal’s Instituto Superior Técnico, was working as a call center developer for a Global 2000 company. Frustrated by the limitations of existing call center systems — specifically that they forced support reps to waste time looking up information in multiple systems to answer customers’ questions — he teamed up with his equally brilliant classmate, Cristina Fonseca, to build a better solution.
They hopped on a plane to the US, entered the annual TwilioCon hackathon and within 48 hours had the first functional version of their application up and running. And in that process, they created the first systemic threat to a sleepy $20B market dominated by legacy vendors accustomed to innovation measured in years. [Disclosure: DFJ is (quite proudly) also an investor in Twilio.]
How were our heroes able to move so fast? To answer that, it helps to understand why the incumbent vendors, in contrast, move so slowly and why they’ve been so inefficient at solving their customers’ problems. The problem is largely a function of the typical call center solution’s technical architecture — a complex mix of on-premise hardware, proprietary software and complicated connectivity; the net effect of which was to make the call center complicated to deploy, expensive to operate and almost impossible to integrate with modern business applications.
Starting from a desire to have all information available on a single screen, the Talkdesk team had the core insight that if the application’s back-end was native in the cloud, it would then be able to talk seamlessly to other SaaS applications. Taking the idea further, they realized that by moving everything into the cloud, Talkdesk could do away with nearly all of the complexity in the hardware and connectivity, delivering customers a complete call center application that would require nothing more than a simple laptop, a browser and a basic Internet connection to deploy.
Ten years ago, this would have meant a significant investment of time and money to build out a full multi-tenant back-end stack. But today, developers like Tiago and Cristina are able to leverage powerful platforms like AWS and Twilio to abstract away the vast majority of that complexity, allowing them to get started quickly — and more importantly, as they’ve scaled, to put their focus on the value added front-end application, not on worrying about building out infrastructure.
Fast forward to today and Talkdesk is a powerful call center suite, delivered entirely via the cloud, in a modern, intuitive and visually beautiful interface. More than 2000 companies, operating in 54 countries around the world, rely on Talkdesk to power their customer service operations, including industry leaders like Dropbox, Weather.com, Homejoy and our own home team, the San Francisco 49ers. Building on Tiago’s original vision for a unified information dashboard, Talkdesk natively supports deep integrations for more than 20 leading business applications, including Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and Zendesk.
As a business, Talkdesk is on an absolute tear. In the last twelve months, they’ve grown both revenues and headcount 10x and show little sign of slowing. DFJ is privileged to be partnering with this exceptional, big-thinking team, and its already impressive roster of seed investors, including Storm Ventures’ Jason Lemkin, the guru of all things SaaS, and Dave McClure, the visionary founder of 500 Startups.
Josh Stein is a partner at DFJ
@dfjjosh
