Klaus, an Estonian QA startup powered by AI, is acquired by Zendesk

Klaus, an Estonian-born startup launched in 2019 to help customer service agents, has been acquired by global customer service platform Zendesk for an undisclosed amount.

Last year, Zendesk also acquired employee management tool Tymeshift and incorporated it into its product. It goes without saying that the overall slump in the tech economy and declining valuations are certainly driving a wave of M&A in this sector.

Ultimately, Kraus raised a total of $19.3 million from investors including Global Founders Capital, Acton Capital, Icebreak.vc, and Creandum.

“By introducing Klaus as part of our WEM portfolio, we are now able to provide enterprises with the best AI-powered automated quality assurance on the market,” Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer at Zendesk, said in a statement. ”.

Kair Käsper, co-founder of Klaus, added, “As AI increases the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered QA can help businesses continue to meet rising customer expectations.” I did.

Klaus initially focused on creating customer service agents, but has transformed into a more full-fledged quality assurance platform powered by AI (the company claimed).

Back in 2019, co-founders Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva left their jobs at Estonian unicorn Pipedrive to launch a “conversational review and QA tool for support teams.”

After acquiring customers such as Automattic, Wistia, and Soundcloud, it raised $1.9 million in seed funding led by Creandum.

And in 2022, Kraus completed a €12 million (approximately $11.49 million) Series A equity round led by Acton Capital.

By that stage, Klaus had trained an AI algorithm to perform the task. This includes automatically classifying comments from customers, categorizing conversations by attributes such as complexity, and performing sentiment analysis in numerous languages ​​to score the “quality” of customer-agent conversations.