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Every customer support call has the same broken moment. The agent asks you to describe what's on your screen, and you can't, so you fumble a screenshot, or read a URL character by character, or give up. Acquire's founders looked at that moment in 2017 and built a company around erasing it. The pitch was almost dull: let the agent see the screen. No download, no plugin, no "please install our screen-share app." They called it co-browsing, and they made it the spine of a customer engagement platform that would eventually serve Audi, United and TaylorMade before selling to Birdeye in 2023.
Acquire was a cloud-based platform for customer-facing teams, headquartered in San Francisco with a large engineering hub in Pune, India. On paper it looked like every other live-chat vendor of its era. In practice it organized itself around a single idea: real conversations beat tickets, and the closer an agent can get to what the customer is actually doing, the shorter the conversation gets.
Acquire's product was less a single tool than a switchboard. Chat, chatbots, video, voice, email and SMS all landed in one agent view, so a support rep never had to alt-tab between six windows to answer one question. The company's own homepage put it plainly: all-in-one customer support, built on a workflow engine, with a unified agent view sitting on top of it.
The individual pieces were familiar. What Acquire sold was the seam between them - the promise that a conversation could start as a chatbot deflection, escalate to a live agent, jump to a co-browse session, and finish on a video call without the customer ever repeating themselves or the agent losing the thread.
Plenty of tools let you share a screen. Almost none let a stranger do it in two clicks with nothing to install, which is exactly the situation a support agent is in. Acquire's co-browsing ran in the browser: the customer stayed on their own site, the agent got a synchronized view, and both could point at the same broken checkout field at the same time. For a bank walking someone through a loan form, or a retailer nudging a hesitant buyer past a cart, that difference is the sale.
This is the part worth stealing if you build software. Acquire didn't try to be the fortieth slightly-better live-chat box. It picked the one feature that makes a demo land - co-browsing - and wrapped the commodity channels around it. The wedge got them in the door at enterprises; the rest of the platform kept them there.
The customer wall read like a mixed enterprise roster: Audi, United, TaylorMade, University of Miami, Plymouth Rock and Thai insurer Muang Thai Life. But the most quoted story was smaller and stranger. Dufresne Group, a Canadian furniture retailer, used Acquire's video and co-browsing tools to run virtual showroom tours during the pandemic - and reported cutting in-person home visits by half while keeping sales moving online.
It's a good reminder that the best product stories are rarely about the product. Nobody at Dufresne cared about co-browsing as a category. They cared about selling a couch to someone who couldn't come in.
Acquire launched into a market that was already loud - Intercom and Drift were redefining chat, Zendesk and Freshworks owned the ticket queue, and specialist tools like Glance and Upscope were pushing co-browsing on its own. Acquire's positioning was to sit between them: broader than the single-feature co-browse tools, more conversation-first than the ticketing incumbents.
The model was B2B SaaS, sold to mid-market and enterprise support and CX teams, with add-on channels and more than 50 integrations into the CRM and helpdesk tools those teams already ran. Funding came in the usual increments - a seed round in 2017, a Series A led by S28 Capital, and a Series B in 2020 with Scale Venture Partners - alongside a roster that included Base10 Partners and Fathom Capital.
Behind the San Francisco address, much of the building happened in Pune, where the product, QA and technical-support teams sat. It's the offshore-hub playbook a lot of B2B SaaS runs quietly: a lean commercial front in the US, a deeper engineering bench in India. For a company of roughly 57 people signing names like United, it was the arithmetic that made the ambition affordable.
In February 2023, Birdeye - a customer-experience and reputation-management company - acquired Acquire to fold live chat and co-browsing into its own platform. Acquire didn't win the CX wars outright; it got pulled into one of the consolidators, which is how most good mid-market tools end their independent lives.
The founders didn't sit still. Co-founder and CEO Laduram Vishnoi went on to start Middleware and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch - proof that the interesting thing about a company is often the people it launches next.
Acquire's timeline is short and clean: a single idea in 2017, a handful of rounds, a set of recognizable logos, and a 2023 exit. But the idea it was built on hasn't aged. Customers still don't want to describe their screen. They want you on it with them.