page_title: Zendesk
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Zendesk / History
caption_attribution_description: Market and Taylor St. San Francisco, CA
context_page_description: Zendesk Inc. is an American customer service software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol ZEN and is a constituent of the Russell 2000 Index. Founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Zendesk has 2,000 employees and serves 119,000 paying customers in 150 countries and territories as of 2017.
context_section_description: Zendesk was founded in 2007 by Mikkel Svane, Morten Primdahl, and Alexander Aghassipour, who had experience with customer service software. The company was started in a loft located in Copenhagen, Denmark. In June 2008, it received US$500,000 in seed funding from angel investor Christoph Janz. In 2009, following a $6 million series B funding from Charles River Ventures and Benchmark Capital, the firm moved to San Francisco.
  In April 2014, it acquired Zopim Technologies Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based provider of live chat software, which eventually became Zopim Premium Live Chat.
  With the acquisition of Zopim, the firm began moving into the AI chat space, announcing premium AI chatbot partners including Netomi and BotXO. In May 2014, the firm became a publicly traded company, debuting with an IPO price of $9 per share.
  On October 13, 2015, the firm acquired for $45.0 million We Are Cloud SAS, the maker of BIME Analytics software, the technology that Zendesk now uses to power its platform.
caption: Zendesk headquarters in San Francisco
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