We’re celebrating 20 years of #AllWaysConnected

I’m proud to share a remarkable milestone — thanks to our incredible customers and talented employees — we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of Khoros!

“Wait, what?,” you might be asking yourselves, if you remember the big launch of Khoros in 2019 — but our roots have a very long history. Twenty years, in fact. It was two decades ago that Lithium Technologies, one of our legacy companies, was founded and began our journey towards omnichannel, digital-first customer engagement. I’m amazed to think that our history in the digital and social space began before the advent of the social media networks, now a part of our daily lives, and we’re still building and growing those capabilities and expertise today.

And none of this would have been possible without our customers who we’re proud to partner with on a daily basis.

I’m thankful for the amazing companies we're privileged to serve: over 2,000 brands from around the world. From the most well-known household brands, to innovative B2B enterprises, we're proud to partner with companies who care as much about creating customers for life as we do.

Since the founding of Lithium 20 years ago, we’ve grown and evolved dramatically, and we’ve never slowed down. This past year alone, we were named a Leader in the Forrester Wave Social Suites, earned the TrustRadius 2021 Tech Cares Award, and named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape — just to name a few.

And we’re not “just” a software company. Khoros is built for enterprise leaders not only because of our software, but also complimented by the services that make the difference for our customers. From our incredible Professional Services Team who sets up our customers for success, to the ongoing partnership that our award-winning Strategic Services Team engages in, we believe that creating customers for life is about earning our customers’ trust and winning together.

As we forge the future for the next 20 years of creating human connection through digital customer experiences, we’re taking a moment to look back at our history. A few highlights:

• 2001 — Lithium Technologies founded in San Francisco, CA

• 2008 — Spredfast founded in Austin, TX

• 2012 — Lithium acquired Social Dynamx, a company specializing in customer support software

• 2014 — Spredfast acquired Mass Relevance, platform to aggregate tweets for TV

• 2017 — Lithium acquired community platform, JiveX, from Jive Software

• 2018 — Lithium and Spredfast join forces

• 2019 — Spredfast & Lithium formally announced their new name: Khoros

• 2021 — Khoros acquired Topbox, an industry leader in analyzing customer sentiment

• 2021 — Khoros acquired Flow.ai, an industry leader in bot automation

• 2021 — Khoros named a Leader in IDC MarketScape

• 2021 — Khoros named a Leader Forrester Wave™️: Social Suites

Lithium and Khoros leadership in brand-owned communities

Since its founding 20 years ago, Lithium has been the leading platform for brand communities by strategically building expertise in planning, deploying, and managing customer communities. In 2008, when branded-owned communities were still relatively novel, Lithium gathered and analyzed years of proprietary data representing billions of interactions, millions of users, and scores of communities.

We’re proud to still be a leader in this space, serve customers with enterprise communities, and build upon the strong foundation that Lithium began so many years ago.

Our growing Digital Contact Center expertise

The one constant of these 20 years of growth has been change, and I’m excited about looking ahead to what’s next in our always-evolving, customer-focused engagement platform. We’ve been up to a lot lately as you can see, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made in the recent years as Khoros.

And now, we’re expanding our expertise in Digital Contact Centers and driving revenue and efficiency with an omnichannel agent desktop, AI-enabled agent assistance, conversational AI, and a 360-degree customer engagement view. In Autumn 2021, we launched new AI and messaging capabilities for our powerful contact center solution, including secure forms in messaging, “no code” chatbot creation and management, Zoom integration, and private message escalation.

Most importantly, we’re excited to continue growing our platform offering for digital contact centers — so stay tuned.

Looking toward the future of Khoros

We’re investing heavily in our teams and growing our organization to keep up with our aggressive business growth and product roadmap. If you want to join our team and help build the future of digital customer engagement, we can’t wait to hear from you. Just head over to our Careers page to see where you can join us.

I want to thank our partners at Vista Equity, whose continued investment will allow us to continue innovating the digital customer engagement space. We’ve made so much progress in bringing the legacy platforms of Lithium and Spredfast together into a unified engagement platform, and have some more exciting updates coming next year. Our growth in digital contact centers is also a priority for us, as we know there is so much power to unlock with incredible customer experiences across digital — desktop and mobile.

In closing, thanks again to our customers for your continued partnership, none of this would be possible without you. And thanks to all of our employees here at Khoros for building innovative solutions, providing award-winning services, and being a great team to work with every day.

Here’s to the next 20 years of #AllWaysConnected,

— Jack