Help Scout
Techstars '11Cambridge, US · Founded 2011 · 292 employees on LinkedIn · 5 known investors
Find your way into Help Scout
114 people in our graph share verified history with the Help Scout team — schools, employers, funds. One of them is your warm intro.
Karan Mehandruunlockedknows Denny Swindle · together at Techstars (overlapped)
×11knows the team · via Techstars
Help Scout builds a customer communication platform for growing businesses that want to provide personalized support at scale. The software powers customer-facing teams across organizations of all sizes, enabling them to manage incoming customer conversations while maintaining a people-centric approach to customer service.
Founders & leadership
Help Scout was founded in 2011 by Nick Francis, Denny Swindle, and Jared McDaniel.
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Nick FrancisinCo-Founder and Chairman of the BoardNick Francis co-founded Help Scout, a customer communication platform, and served as CEO for 15 years before transitioning to Chairman. He now focuses on advising and mentoring founders and early-stage CEOs.
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Denny SwindleinDistinguished Architect & Co-FounderDenny Swindle is a co-founder of Help Scout who began his career in the mid-1990s as a C++ developer working on backend systems and UIs, later shifting to Java and web development across various startups including roles at American Express, before co-founding Help Scout after participating in the 2011 TechStars accelerator program.
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Jared McDanielinVP of Product Design and Co-Founder
Investors · 5
Founder mafia
2 people who came through Help Scout went on to found or lead other companies.
Competitors · 6
by search overlap
Zendesk5843 shared keywordsThis is Zendesk's internal belonging/diversity and inclusion program page, not a company profile page for an external company. It describes Zendesk's internal culture initiatives and leadership development programs.
Hiver3275 shared keywordsHiver Omni is an AI-powered omnichannel platform for customer support teams that unifies email, chat, Slack, voice, WhatsApp, and SMS into one interface, with AI agents handling complex multi-step requests and integrations pulling real-time customer data from CRM, project management, and collaboration tools. It serves support, finance, and IT teams at organizations with complex support operations.
Sprinklr2096 shared keywordsSprinklr provides an AI-native customer experience platform that manages feedback, customer interactions, and contact center operations across multiple channels. The platform serves large enterprises by automating feedback analysis, conversational analytics, quality management, and social listening to improve customer satisfaction and agent performance.
Tidio1909 shared keywordsTidio is a customer service platform combining a help desk with Lyro, an AI agent that automates support conversations and can be trained on verified data sources. It targets small and medium businesses looking to scale customer support while keeping responses reliable and on-brand.
RingCentral1740 shared keywordsRingCentral provides cloud-based unified communications and AI-powered contact center solutions for businesses, serving over 600,000 customers worldwide. The platform integrates voice, video, messaging, and conversation intelligence to enable secure, efficient enterprise communications.
Keeping1464 shared keywordsKeeping is a shared inbox management tool that integrates directly into Gmail and Google Workspace, enabling teams to collaborate on email without requiring separate platforms or complex help desk systems.
Companies competing with Help Scout for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
Frequently asked questions
- What does Help Scout do?
- Help Scout builds a customer communication platform for growing businesses that want to provide personalized support at scale. The software powers customer-facing teams across organizations of all sizes, enabling them to manage incoming customer conversations while maintaining a people-centric approach to customer service.
- Who founded Help Scout?
- Help Scout was founded by Nick Francis, Denny Swindle, Jared McDaniel in 2011.
- Who are Help Scout's investors?
- Help Scout's investors include Converge, Foundry, Lead Edge Capital, Techstars, Zelkova Ventures.
- Where is Help Scout headquartered?
- Help Scout is headquartered in Cambridge, US.