Zendesk will acquire Forethought, a company that makes software that automates customer service interactions, the companies announced Wednesday. The deal is expected to be completed by the end of March.
AI agents, especially customer service, may be all the rage right now, but Forethought was years ahead of its time. In fact, it was the 2018 winner of TechCrunch Battlefield, our iconic startup pitch competition. By the way, ChatGPT wasn’t released until late 2022.
Following its Battlefield win, Forethought has acquired major customers including Upwork, Grammarly, Airtable, and Datadog, and the company says it will support more than 1 billion customer interactions per month by 2025.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In raising $25 million last year, Forethought said it had raised a total of $115 million from backers including Blue Cloud Ventures, NEA, Industry Ventures, Neo, Village Global, and Sound Ventures, as well as angels including May Habib (author), Scott Wu (Cognition), Karan Goel (Cartesia), and Gwyneth Paltrow.
AI co-founder and chairman Deon Nicholas called the acquisition a milestone in a LinkedIn post. “More than seven years ago, we had a simple but ambitious idea: AI could transform the customer experience. When we first launched Forethought at TechCrunch Disrupt, that vision felt bold, even a little crazy. Today, AI agents aren’t just transforming the customer experience; they’re transforming every industry imaginable,” he writes.
Shortly before the acquisition was announced, Nicholas appeared on TechCrunch’s Build Mode podcast to talk about preparing to win at Battlefield, how he acquired his first customers, and what’s next for agent technologies like browser control.
By the way, the 2026 TechCrunch Startup Battlefield is currently accepting applications.
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Zendesk, best known for its self-help customer service products, says it will continue to support Forethought’s existing customers and integrate the startup’s technology into its AI products, which include more specialized agents, self-improving AI, voice automation and more autonomous features. The company says the acquisition will accelerate its product roadmap by more than a year.
Zendesk has been privately held since November 2022, when it was acquired by a consortium led by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira in a $10.2 billion deal. Not disclosing the terms of this latest deal is fairly consistent with that pattern over time. Zendesk has made about a dozen acquisitions since its founding in 2007, but the numbers have been modest, with only a few disclosures of prices, including $29.8 million for live chat company Zopim in 2014 and $45 million for analytics company BIME in 2015.
