Freshworks is continuing, and even accelerating, its rapid climb in the customer engagement space, and the wider IT industry with its announcement that it has secured $100 million in financing and has hired former AppDynamics Vice President of Finance & Treasury Suresh Seshadri as its chief financial officer.
The latest round of funding is co-led by Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and CapitalG and brings Freshworks’ total amount of capital raised to $250 million. The cash infusion will be used to further expand Freshworks’ worldwide expansion as well as continued investment in its integrated SaaS platform.
We saw, earlier this year at ServiceNow’s Knowledge18 event in Las Vegas, that Freshworks is happy to show its willingness to knock on the door of the established leaders in this industry, when they staged a ‘guerilla’ marketing campaign around the event. That gutsiness and fearlessness should serve them well in a crowded and very competitive market space.
Freshworks provides organizations of all sizes with SaaS solutions that make it easy for customer support, sales and marketing professionals to communicate effectively with customers for better service and collaborate with team members to resolve customer issues. To date, over 150,000 organizations worldwide use Freshworks, including NHS, Honda, Rightmove, Hugo Boss, Citizens Advice, Toshiba and Cisco. The company is headquartered in San Bruno, Calif., and has offices in India, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia.
“When we started Freshworks in 2010, we were a single-product company with a goal of offering better, easier-to-use customer service software than what was in the market. We’ve since scaled our company to $100M in annual recurring revenue and built a full SaaS platform where all of our products – such as Freshsales, Freshdesk, and Freshservice – work together seamlessly, without requiring additional integration resources or consultants to make the software simply work,” said Girish Mathrubootham, the co-founder and CEO of Freshworks. “With the addition of Suresh leading our financial management and strategy toward a path of free cash flow break-even and our latest – and likely last – private funding round in place, we believe we have a unique opportunity to attract customers from around the globe who have been let down by legacy solutions.”
“The business software landscape today is teeming with bloated, inflexible and expensive solutions,” said Sameer Gandhi, a partner at Accel. “Freshworks has built the only customer engagement platform on the market that elegantly meets the needs of a business of any size with software that is modern, intuitive and affordable. We’re confident that the Freshworks approach is the way forward for businesses seeking a better approach.”
“Sequoia first backed Freshworks in 2016 and didn’t hesitate for a moment to double down on the investment,” said Mohit Bhatnagar, the managing director of Sequoia Capital India Advisors. “Girish and his team have worked relentlessly to build Freshworks into a leading SaaS company from India – one that is truly global with customers across 126 countries. The investment reinforces the Sequoia principle of being a long-term business partner to founders and supporting them at every stage of their company’s growth.
Seshadri, the company’s new CFO, previously helped prepare AppDynamics for its IPO before it was acquired by Cisco in 2017. “Freshworks has been riding an incredible wave of growth,” he said. “Coming on board to work with Girish and the rest of the executive team is an incredible opportunity and I am confident that we are well-positioned to reach the next phase of Freshworks’ expansion.”
Since its last funding round, Freshworks has made several technology acquisitions to further bolster its product offerings. Several of these technologies were featured in its recently announced cloud bundle, Freshworks 360, that brings together sales, marketing and support applications to provide users with a full, easy-to-use customer engagement experience.
It is going to be interesting to watch the continuing rise of this company, coming from nowhere in a relatively short space of time, as they continue to disrupt the industry and tap on the backs of giants
