A year after it raised $2.6 million to launch its Slack-based IT help service, Boulder-based Halp announced that it has been acquired by Australian software giant Atlassian.
This acquisition further cements Atlassian's integration with Slack, after the strategic rivals joined forces in 2018. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"The team that built Halp is off to a great start, and we’re excited to put the full power of Atlassian behind them as they continue their mission to make the world’s best messaging-native app for handling requests between teams," Atlassian wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.
With Halp, Slack turns into an internal help desk solution that works for any team that fields questions via workplace messaging, including IT, security, legal, finance and support. Once you add Halp to your Slack workspace, you can use an emoji reaction to turn any message into a ticket that tracks the progress and outcomes of inbound requests.
“We’re thrilled to hear that our strategic partner Atlassian is acquiring Halp,” Brad Armstrong, VP of business development and corporate development at Slack, said in a statement. “With its messaging-first approach to support ticketing, Halp is an outstanding tool for any team already collaborating in Slack channels. We see enormous opportunities in building this business together with Atlassian.”
Halp graduated from Techstars in 2018 and closed a $2.6 million seed round in April 2019 led by Matchstick Ventures to build out its conversational ticketing model. Slack, Techstars Ventures, Next Frontier Capital and Access Venture Partners also participated in the round.
Despite only being live for about a year, Halp said it is excited to quickly grow with Atlassian at its back.
"We’ll be able to harness the vast resources at Atlassian to continue with our mission to make Halp the best tool for any team collaborating on requests with other teams. Our team will grow and be able to focus on making the core experience of Halp even more powerful," the company wrote in a blog post. "We’ll also develop a deeper integration with the Atlassian suite - improving our existing Jira and Confluence integrations and discovering the possibilities of Halp generating alerts in Opsgenie, cards in Trello, and much more."
In tandem with the acquisition news, Halp announced a new product: Halp Answers. This feature enables teams to leverage the knowledge that already exists within the company to automatically answer tickets right in Slack. That knowledge can be pulled in from Slack messages, Confluence articles or any piece of knowledge in the organization.
Halp was also named to Colorado Inno's 20 Colorado Startups to Watch in 2020 list.
