Social-sharing and scheduling tool Buffer has acquired fellow California-based company Respondly, a startup launched in 2014 by Favstar founder Tim Haines. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This acquisition sees Buffer broaden its reach beyond social media publishing and into customer service, marking a notable evolution for the company.

Buffer’s raised around $4 million in funding since its inception in 2010, and the startup has built a solid reputation for its easy-to-use social sharing tool that lets you schedule messages to post at preset times throughout a day, in addition to other publishing tools and analytics.

With almost $2 million in funding to date, Respondly is a customer service tool for companies that use Twitter to deal with queries and complaints — it lets managers assign tweets to team members to respond to, and collates replies and mentions to ensure that nothing gets buried in the Twitter noise. The tool is used by some notable companies, including Slack, WordPress.com, and Stripe.

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