Cleverly's EIC Accelerator Project: Any Help Desk Against Zendesk

Cleverly, a Lisbon start-up co-founded by Cristina Fonseca, who had earlier co-founded the contact centre software company Talkdesk, set out to give customer support agents an AI assistant that would work on any help desk. In the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, it won a grant for COALA, a "Cloud-based AI-driven and Language-agnostic Customer Support Assistant", according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names Cleverly, Lda as the only beneficiary of the project. CORDIS puts the EU contribution at €1,518,927.38 towards a total cost of €2,169,896.25, for a project planned to run from 1 September 2019 to 28 February 2022.

It did not run that long. On 26 August 2021 Zendesk announced that it had bought Cleverly, with the whole team joining on 30 August and the terms undisclosed, according to TechCrunch and ECO News. CORDIS records that COALA was "terminated on 7 September 2021", about six months early, and the final report says that from then on "only Zendesk customers will benefit from it".

What Cleverly Is Today

Cleverly still exists as a legal entity, but as a subsidiary, not as a product company. The Portuguese register, as shown by North Data, lists it as active, with Zendesk Inc. and Tymeshift Inc. named as shareholders in January 2025 and Zendesk International Ltd and Tymeshift Inc in September 2025; Zendesk completed its purchase of Tymeshift, a workforce management tool, in June 2023, according to IT Brief. The register summary on Racius shows filed accounts for every year from 2018 to 2024, two merger filings in September 2024, and a merger filing, a capital increase and a change of legal form in January 2025. eInforma gives the current name as Cleverly, Unipessoal, Lda and lists a 2025 balance sheet. The sources disagree in one respect: "Unipessoal" denotes a single-member company, while North Data names two shareholders. Which company merged with Cleverly, and the entity's revenue and staff, are behind paywalls and could not be verified.

The brand is gone. The cleverly.ai domain now shows a holding page from the brand-protection firm MarkMonitor. Zendesk itself was taken private on 22 November 2022 by a consortium led by Hellman & Friedman and Permira in a deal valuing it at about $10.2 billion, and remains headquartered in San Francisco, according to Zendesk and Permira.

Even the founding year is reported differently. The register gives 9 October 2018, with €20,000 of share capital and Pedro Luis de Faria as the first registered manager, removed on 14 September 2021, according to North Data; Racius also gives 9 October 2018. TechCrunch and ECO News wrote in 2021 that Cleverly was "founded in 2019", while Fonseca's speaker biography at MWC Barcelona says she co-founded it "in 2018". Her profile in Forbes Portugal confirms she founded Cleverly and became Zendesk's vice-president for product after the sale.

The Technology: Reading Tickets So Agents Do Not Have To

The CORDIS objective describes the problem in the company's numbers: support agents spend 20% of their time looking for information, which it put at €10,400 a year per agent. It dismissed the alternatives of the time as too narrow: deflection tools that send customers to help articles handle only simple questions, and template tools need constant manual upkeep. Cleverly instead promised a "generic recommendation model" trained in advance, so that a small support team could switch it on without data scientists, across industries and languages.

In practice the software classified, prioritised and routed tickets by intent and suggested replies to agents. At the time of the sale it classified content "in over a dozen languages" and counted Vodafone, Dashlane and Decathlon as customers, according to VentureBeat; CX Today confirms the language range, but the customer names appear in only that one source. TechCrunch reported integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce, and ECO News also listed Freshdesk and Intercom.

What COALA Promised, and What the Record Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 9 October 2019, more than five weeks after the project's start date. The proposal's business case was ambitious: 20 to 30% annual cost savings for customers, agent turnover cut by 22%, 94 employees by 2025 and a "project ROI of 26". Its listed deliverables were concrete: a new website, listings on the Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, Salesforce and Intercom marketplaces, a dashboard that drafts knowledge base articles with AI, support for 10 new languages tested with at least one customer on Zendesk, and a final version that retrains its own models from user feedback, according to the CORDIS results page, which lists all eight as deliverables but publishes none of their content.

The final periodic report, covering 1 September 2020 to 28 February 2022, says the software was used by companies in Europe and the United States, with "productivity improvements of 2x and cost savings of 10% to 60%". These are the company's own figures; no customer case study with numbers could be found. The report also states that Cleverly had created "10+ jobs, all of them in Portugal" and still expected "90+ jobs" by 2025. No later headcount for Cleverly or for Zendesk's Lisbon team has been published.

1. Pre-trained support assistant for SMEsDeliveredSold to paying customers before the sale, per CORDIS and VentureBeat.
2. Multi-language supportDelivered"Over a dozen languages", per VentureBeat and CX Today.
3. Listings on Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, Salesforce and IntercomPartly, then withdrawnFreshdesk, Salesforce and Intercom named by the final report; Zoho not; all but Zendesk dropped after the sale.
4. 20 to 30% customer cost savingsNot verifiedCompany claims 10% to 60%; no independent figure.
5. 94 employees by 2025Not achieved"10+ jobs" reported; no later figure announced.
6. Full 30-month projectEnded earlyTerminated 7 September 2021, after 24 months.

COALA was not Cleverly's only EU project. From 2 November 2020 it also held a €128,750 Horizon 2020 grant under the European SME innovation Associate pilot, CCOALA, to hire a researcher to extend the assistant from email to live chat, according to CORDIS. Its report is unusually frank: the associate "left during the first month", the work done was "minimal" and "the majority of the work was not complete". It was terminated on 6 September 2021, a day before COALA.

After the Sale: Cleverly Inside Zendesk

The technology did reach the market, under another name. On 14 September 2022 Zendesk launched Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist, which detect "the intent, language and sentiment of each customer interaction" and guide agents in real time, included in Zendesk Suite Enterprise and initially aimed at retail and e-commerce, according to Zendesk's press release, which does not mention Cleverly. TechTarget and VentureBeat both report that the features were built on the Cleverly technology; TechTarget adds that the launch came with 313 pre-configured service events such as refunds and invoice disputes. Zendesk's help centre still documents intelligent triage today, now available on Suite and Support Professional plans and above.

That is a delivery, but a narrower one than the EU was told. COALA's case rested on a tool that any small support team could plug into whichever help desk it used; what exists now is a feature for one vendor's customers. How many companies use intelligent triage, and how much of today's product goes back to the code the EU co-funded, is not public.

The Money and What Cannot Be Checked

Cleverly "has not been entirely public about the size of its funding", TechCrunch noted at the time of the sale, and no private round could be found; the only public money in its record is the two EU grants: €1,518,927.38 for COALA and €128,750 for CCOALA. The COALA award was grant only, and Cleverly does not appear in the EIC Fund portfolio. The purchase price was not disclosed by either side.

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence, first agreed in 2018, aims for an environment where AI "excellence thrives from the lab to market". Cleverly fits that aim on the first half: a Portuguese team turned applied machine learning into a sellable product with EU support and found a buyer within three years. It also shows the familiar second half of the story. The buyer was a US-headquartered software group, later owned by two private equity firms, and the result is now one feature inside its product rather than an independent European supplier of customer service AI.

The Verdict

Neither Zendesk nor Cleverly's founders were asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.