Talkdesk


Talkdesk is a unicorn cloud-based contact center, unified communications and artificial intelligence software provider founded in Portugal in 2011. It is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in London, Lisbon, Madrid, Salt Lake City, Coimbra, Aveiro and Porto.

History

In 2011, Talkdesk co-founders Cristina Fonseca and Tiago Paiva noticed the paradigm regarding call center software was not only sloppy but outdated. They entered a contest hosted by Twilio and built the first version of Talkdesk using Twilio's API in 10 days. They were selected to present at Twilio's conference and after winning were invited to join 500 Startup's third batch.
Cristina Fonseca and Tiago Paiva founded the company in 2011 and raised $450,000. Talkdesk demonstrated at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in May, 2012. In August 2014, the company raised $3.15 million led by Storm Ventures.
In 2015, Talkdesk raised $21 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Salesforce Ventures and Storm Ventures.
During this time, Talkdesk began to receive industry recognition for its platform.
Talkdesk became the first CCaaS Unicorn, and the fastest growing CCaaS provider globally, during October 2018. Talkdesk raised $100 million in series B funding at a valuation of over US$1 billion.
In 2019, Talkdesk was named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Centre as a Service, and is the youngest CCaaS/Contact Centre provider ever to be featured in a Gartner MQ report.

Technology

Talkdesk uses WebRTC technology. They use Backbone.js for the frontend and Ruby-related technologies for the backend.
Talkdesk also takes advantage of some NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB, Redis for storage and caching solutions, as well as RabbitMQ for inter-application messaging and leverage internal hypermedia APIs.
Talkdesk is one of the only CCaaS providers to offer a 100% availability service level agreement for its platform. Talkdesk is able to offer this by leveraging a deep network of global telecom providers and multi-carrier/multi-platform redundancy. Other CCaaS providers, such as Edify are also starting to offer 100% uptime SLAs.