AI-powered Estonian QA startup Klaus acquired by Zendesk | TechCrunch

Klaus – an Estonian-born startup which emerged in 2019 to aid customer services agents – has been acquired by global customer services platform Zendesk for an undisclosed amount.

Last year Zendesk also acquired Tymeshift, a workforce management tool, to fold into its product. IT would be remiss of us not to mention that the downturn in the the overall tech economy and drop in valuations has certainly helped powered a wave of M&A in the sector.

By the end, Klaus had raised a total of $19.3 million from investors including Global Founders Capital, Acton Capital, Icebreaker.vc and Creandum.

In a statement, Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer of Zendesk, said: “With Klaus as part of our WEM portfolio, we can empower businesses with the best AI-powered automated quality assurance in the market.”

Kair Käsper, co-founder of Klaus, added: “As AI drives up the speed and frequency of customer engagement, only AI-powered QA can help companies keep up with rising customer expectations.”

Klaus started out focusing on making customer services agents, but morphed into a more fully-fledged Quality Assurance platform powered by AI (claimed the company).

Back in 2019, co-founders, Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva emerged from being employees at Estonian unicorn Pipedrive, to launch a “conversation review and QA tool for Support teams.”

After winning customers like Automattic, Wistia and Soundcloud they closed a $1.9 million in seed funding led by Creandum.

Then in 2022, Klaus closed closed a €12 million (~$11.49 million) Series A equity round led by Acton Capital.

By that stage Klaus was training AI algorithms to perform tasks. These included automatically categorizing comments from customers, sorting conversations by attributes like complexity, and performing sentiment analysis in a number of languages, thus scoring the “quality” of customer-agent conversations.