The support-as-a-software provider Zendesk was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007 by the Denish guys Morten Primdahl, Alexander Aghassipour, and Mikkel Svane and went public in 2014. Now, Zendesk has agreed to be acquired by a venture capital group led by Hellman & Friedman LLC and Permira for $10.2 billion, WSJ reports. This is down sharply from a roughly $17 billion bid from a similar group of buyout firms the company rejected in February 2022. Another signal of a weak tech sector!
Founded in 2007, Zendesk specializes in helping companies with customer communications. According to its website, the San Francisco-based company has roughly 5,450 employees and more than 160,000 paid accounts. The company was founded in Copenhagen in 2007 and raised about $86 million in venture capital investments before going public in 2014.
In Feb 2022, Zendesk said that it had rejected a $17 billion takeover proposal from a group of private-equity firms that it didn’t name. However, WSJ, revealed that this group included Hellman & Friedman, Advent International Corp. and Permira. Later that month, Zendesk shareholders rejected a proposed $4.1 billion deal to acquire the parent of web-survey company SurveyMonkey.
