Zendesk acquires AI search startup Unleash for tens of millions
Founded in 2020, Unleash has raised around $20 million and has built secure AI search for large enterprises.
Zendesk has acquired Unleash, an AI-powered enterprise search company, in a deal whose value was not disclosed but is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
Unleash was founded in 2020 by CEO Itay Itzhaki and CTO Omer Koren and develops AI-driven enterprise search technology that connects knowledge spread across dozens of internal systems while adhering to organizational permission and security rules. Over the past year, the company tripled its sales and doubled its number of employees. Unleash has raised around $20 million since its founding, including funding from TLV Partners.
Zendesk said the acquisition will allow it to deliver fast, accurate, and permission-aware answers to employees directly inside collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Unleash’s technology connects more than 70 enterprise content sources, including Google Drive, Confluence, and SharePoint, and integrates them with case management, automation, and analytics.
“As organizations rapidly adopt AI, rethinking how they deliver internal employee support is becoming mission-critical,” said Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering and AI at Zendesk. He said the acquisition places AI “directly in the flow of work,” enabling secure self-service while maintaining seamless escalation to human experts.
Zendesk was acquired by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Permira in 2022 in a transaction valued at approximately $10.2 billion. Since then, Zendesk has increasingly positioned itself as an AI-first service platform, extending beyond customer support into broader employee service use cases.
Unleash’s core technology is built around permission-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), ensuring that AI responses reflect exactly what a given employee is authorized to see, a critical requirement for large enterprises operating under strict privacy and regulatory constraints. Its AI knowledge agents operate natively within collaboration tools, with built-in handoff to human specialists when automated responses fall short.
“Our mission has always been to make information accessible and actionable right where work happens,” said Itay Itzhaki, co-founder and CEO of Unleash. “By joining Zendesk, we can bring that capability to a much broader set of organizations while keeping security and privacy at the forefront.”
