Zendesk, Inc.

Company overview. Zendesk, Inc. is a San Francisco–headquartered customer-service software company founded in 2007 (originally in Copenhagen, reincorporated in Delaware in 2009). It listed on the NYSE as ZEN in 2014 and was taken private in November 2022 by a consortium led by private-equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira in a $10.2 billion all-cash deal ($77.50/share) (Reuters, S&P Global). It is now privately held; at the time of the buyout it reported roughly 5,500–6,000 employees and annual revenue around $1.5–1.6 billion, and no current public financials are available.

Products / operations. Zendesk is an operating company selling a cloud-based customer experience (CX) platform. Its main offerings are the Zendesk Suite (ticketing/Support, messaging and live chat, Talk telephony, Guide knowledge base, and Explore analytics), AI agents and Copilot assistant tools (built partly on its 2024 acquisition of Ultimate), and Zendesk Sell, a sales-CRM product. It reports serving over 100,000 business customers.

Patent-litigation posture. Zendesk is a defendant-only party in the tracked data: 0 plaintiff cases and 1 defendant case, consistent with an operating company defending against a patent-assertion suit. The single tracked matter, Peter Henrik Pedersen v. Zendesk, Inc. (6:22-cv-00927, filed September 8, 2022), was brought in the Western District of Texas before Judge Alan D. Albright in Waco — a venue known for attracting patent suits. Plaintiff Pedersen is an individual NPE (Stanford NPE Litigation Database categorizes him as an individual asserter; Unified Patents links him to AiPi Solutions).

Notable context. The suit asserted U.S. Patent No. 6,965,920, directed to a "profile responsive electronic message management system," which Pedersen also asserted against numerous other software companies (Salesforce, Intuit, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Wix, and others). Unified Patents reports the PTAB invalidated the '920 patent in IPR2023-00029, with the Federal Circuit affirming in March 2026. Zendesk has no tracked cases where it acts as a plaintiff.