Zendesk is acquiring Forethought, a company that builds software to automate customer service interactions, the companies announced on Wednesday. The deal is expected to close by the end of March.

While AI agents, particularly for customer service, may be all the rage now, Forethought was years ahead of its time. In fact, it was the 2018 winner of TechCrunch Battlefield, our iconic startup pitch competition. For context, ChatGPT didn’t launch until late 2022.

Following its Battlefield win, Forethought landed marquee customers like Upwork, Grammarly, Airtable, and Datadog, it said, and by 2025 was supporting more than a billion monthly customer interactions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Forethought raised total funding of $115 million from backers like Blue Cloud Ventures, NEA, Industry Ventures, Neo, Village Global, and Sound Ventures, as well as angels like May Habib (Writer), Scott Wu (Cognition), Karan Goel (Cartesia), and Gwyneth Paltrow, the company said when it raised a $25 million round last year.

Forethought AI co-founder and chairman Deon Nicholas called the acquisition a milestone in a LinkedIn post. “More than seven years ago, we set out with a simple but ambitious idea: AI could transform the customer experience. When we first launched Forethought at TechCrunch Disrupt, that vision felt bold—even a little crazy. Today, AI agents aren’t just transforming customer experience. They’re transforming every industry imaginable,” he wrote.

Shortly before the acquisition was announced, Nicholas appeared on TechCrunch’s Build Mode podcast, where he discussed how he prepared to win Battlefield, how he landed his first customers, and what comes next for agentic tech, like browser control.

By the way, applications for the 2026 TechCrunch Startup Battlefield are currently open.

Zendesk, best known for its self-help customer service products, says it will continue to support Forethought’s existing customers and integrate the startup’s technology into its own AI products — including more specialized agents, self-improving AI, voice automation, and more autonomous capabilities. The company says the acquisition accelerates its product roadmap by more than a year.

Zendesk has been privately held since November 2022, when it was acquired by a consortium led by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira in a $10.2 billion deal. Not disclosing terms of this newest deal is pretty consistent with its pattern over time. Zendesk has made roughly a dozen acquisitions since its founding in 2007, and the few times it has disclosed a price, the figures were modest, including $29.8 million for live-chat company Zopim in 2014, and $45 million for analytics firm BIME in 2015.