Zendesk

Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour and Morten Primdahl were tired of the heavyweight helpdesk systems they had been made to work in and built their own in 2007: a web-based ticketing system where every email, chat or call from a customer becomes a ticket that can be assigned, prioritised and answered. The name was meant to signal calm, and the Buddha-like figure in the logo lasted until 2016. The company moved to San Francisco in 2009 when American investors insisted.

Zendesk became a textbook case of SaaS spreading from the bottom up: one support team starts, the rest of the company follows. The IPO came in 2014. In February 2022 the board rejected a bid of around 17 billion dollars; four months later, after the share price had collapsed, it accepted 10.2 billion from the private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira. The competitors are Freshdesk, Salesforce Service Cloud and ServiceNow.