Talkdesk

Talkdesk provides cloud contact center software that routes customer calls, chats and emails and, more recently, runs AI agents alongside human ones. Tiago Paiva started it in Portugal in 2011 from a hackathon project, with co-founder Cristina Fonseca, and it competed in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt New York in 2012. The company is based in San Francisco with a large engineering presence in Lisbon. It says it has more than 3,000 customers in over 100 countries, and earlier customers named in press coverage include IBM, Dropbox, Farfetch, Acxiom and Fujitsu.

Talkdesk raised a $15 million Series A in June 2015 from investors including DFJ and Storm Ventures. In October 2015 Salesforce Ventures led a $6 million extension, bringing the Series A to $21 million. Wikipedia lists 500 Startups among its early backers. In October 2018 the company raised $100 million from Viking Global Investors and existing investor DFJ at a valuation above $1 billion, making it one of Portugal's first unicorns. A $143 million Series C in July 2020 valued it at $3 billion. In August 2021 it announced a $230 million Series D at a $10 billion valuation. New investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group joined existing backers Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital. Total funding reached $498 million.

Talkdesk remains private and independent. Alongside the Series D it hired Sydney Carey, formerly of Sumo Logic, as its first chief financial officer, and investors said publicly that they expected an eventual IPO, though none has been filed. The company has since repositioned around customer experience automation, combining its contact center platform with AI agents. It reports more than 150 million customer interactions a month and has been named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for contact center as a service.

Talkdesk shows how a capital-efficient SaaS company can move into crossover money. Early backers DFJ, Storm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and 500 Startups put in about $24 million before 2018. Hedge fund and crossover investors then supplied most of the $498 million in three rounds, taking the valuation from just over $1 billion to $10 billion in under three years. Ten years after its 2011 start, the earliest investors were still waiting for liquidity, and the 2021 price has not been tested publicly.