San Francisco-headquartered customer experience and engagement software company Zendesk announced today that it has received an undisclosed amount of financial grant from Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB).
Zendesk will use the grant to “invest in and develop” local talent, and foresees its product development and engineering team doubling over the next three years.
Zendesk first entered the Singapore market with its $30 million acquisition of local startup Zopim Technologies in 2014 to expand the firm’s chat capabilities.
Since then, Zendesk’s business in the region has been reported to be experiencing over 30% year-on-year growth, with Asia-Pacific contributing to more than 10% of the company’s global revenue.
According to its press release, Zendesk has a goal of becoming a billion dollar company by 2020.
Zendesk currently has over 650 employees in Asia-Pacific, with 130 of them being located in Singapore.
The Singapore product and engineering teams lead the end-to-end development responsibilities for Zendesk Chat, and works closes with Zendesk’s product and engineering teams in San Francisco and Dublin, as well as supporting teams in Copenhagen, Melbourne, and Montpellier.
With its partnership with EDB, Zendesk has plans to expand the Singapore team’s scope into new initiatives, like the launch of CRM platform Zendesk Sunshine, the acquisition of omnichannel message platform Smooch, and WhatsApp for Zendesk.
Zendesk is also looking to hire more employees in Singapore to “support the nation’s commitment to bridging the tech talent gap”.
Said Kiren Kumar, Chief Digital Industry Officer, Digital Industry Singapore: “This investment reflects Zendesk’s continued and long term commitment to Singapore, in growing a strong pool of digital and tech talent and providing exciting job opportunities for Singaporeans.”
Roles they are looking to hire for include software engineers, product managers, DevOps engineers, security engineers, user experience researchers and programme managers.
Sandie Overtveld, Vice President APAC, Zendesk said: “Expanding our capabilities in the region allows us to leverage both local and regional talent, as well as deepen our relationships with regional customers – such as Grab, Circles.Life, NTUC FairPrice, and StashAway – to continue developing solutions that are closely aligned to their needs.”
Added Abhishek Deshmukh, Managing Director of Singapore and Vice President of Engineering: “The products and solutions we develop in Singapore are used by brands in more than 160 markets, in 60 different languages, and by more than 1 million customer support agents everyday.”
“The partnership with EDB builds on the commitment we made two years ago, and will further enable us to tap into and invest in Singapore’s world-class engineering talent, and explore opportunities to partner with education and research institutions across the region to complement our focus on global product innovation.”
Zendesk has just opened a new 50,000 sq ft Singapore office in Marina One.
Here’s a peek around the shiny new Zendesk Singapore office. #lifeatzendesk pic.twitter.com/tz0uIbdQYM
— Zendesk (@Zendesk) July 24, 2019