Zendesk opens new Denmark office, teams up with startup incubators

Customer help desk management provider Zendesk today announced that it is opening a new office in Denmark and is teaming up with nearly a dozen startup incubators around the world to give its customer support software.

The company is working with the likes of Y Combinator and Seedcamp to give those attending startups its software for free for a year.?Zendesk operates a Web-based help desk service that lets companies track customer complaints across most of the web. It’s one of a number of startups trying to bring the ideas behind consumer-facing technology like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise space.

“We were once a startup and we know how important it is to get help from those other companies whenever [you can] get it,” Zack Urlocker, the company’s chief operating officer, told VentureBeat. “Incubators weren’t around when we were getting started, and now that they are, they’re one of the best ways to get an idea off the ground, so naturally we wanted to work with them.”

Some of Zendesk’s largest customers are graduates from those same incubators.?The company now has 10,000 customers, including the likes of superstar startups Groupon, Airbnb and Dropbox. Erply, another major customer, is a graduate of Europe’s Seedcamp — another incubator Zendesk is working with.

“It isn’t a play for new customers,” Urlocker said. “We just wanted to throw some help out.”

The company now has more than 100 employees, and while it’s based in San Francisco, Calif., it has strong ties to Copenhagen, Denmark. That’s where the company is born and where the company has a “fan base,” Urlocker said. There’s a lot of talent there that the company would like to tap into, and it already has a large number of connections there thanks to Zendesk chief executive Mikkel Svane’s history in the city, Urlocker said.

Zendesk is part of a number of new-age venture-backed enterprise startups that are bringing consumer tech to the enterprise.?The company?recently closed its third round of fundraising,?worth $19 million. It also?closed a $6 million fundraising round in August 2009.

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Tags: customer help desk, enterprise, incubator, seed funding

Companies: Seedcamp, Y Combinator, Zendesk

People: Zack Urlocker

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Stealth startup Hopper gets $8M for travel search

Hopper, a startup focused on travel search for consumers, has just announced it’s raising an $8 million round of funding.

The company was founded in 2007 by former Expedia employees. The service itself is still in closed alpha testing.

What we do know about Hopper’s product is that it won’t be focused on finding prices and itineraries for folks who already know where they want to go and what they want to do. Rather, Hopper will accept natural language queries from users and return a list of destinations and travel options accordingly.

For example, you might user Hopper to search for “Montana horseback riding.” The site would then give you a list of locations to check out, as well as air travel and lodging suggestions. The specific travel options are ranked by several criteria, including price, quality and convenience.

According to a release from the company, Hopper is trying to build the world’s largest database of travel information using cluster computing techniques. Specific technologies involved include machine learning, NoSQL databases and big data processing. Rather than competing with travel search startups such as Hipmunk, Hopper says its focus on natural language search and a robust back end put it more in competition with Google’s ITA travel data service and perhaps even Google itself, once the search giant launches its highly anticipated flight search tools.

Currently, Hopper is based in Montreal. However, the company will soon be moving its headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in search of what CEO Frederic Lalonde called “a particular kind of programming geek.”

This round of funding is Hopper’s second institutional round. Previously, the startup raised $2 million in 2008. The current funding, which comes from Atlas Venture and Brightspark Ventures, brings Hopper’s total funding to $10 million.

Image courtesy of banyek.

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Tags: funding

Companies: atlas venture, brightspark, hopper

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