Inside Freshworks’ Rise From India Enterprise Tech Startup To $10 Billion

Girish Mathrubootham started small. That didn’t last long. Four days after launching Freshworks, his customer service platform in October 2010 from an air conditioning duct warehouse in Chennai, a metropolis in the South of India, and staffed with a team of six rockstar programmers, his startup was instantly international. Atwell College, a public high school in Perth, Australia, nearly four thousand miles away, spent a couple of hours poking around the platform Mathrubootham envisioned as an empowering customer experience, and signed on as the first Freshworks customer. Within 200 days—and no outside funding—Freshworks had 200 small and medium business customers spread across the globe. Venture capital firms such as Accel, Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital caught wind of the startup’s steep trajectory and in 2018, Freshworks raised $100 million in Series G funding, hitting a $1.5 billion valuation and becoming India’s first enterprise tech unicorn. Now, in a week packed with public offerings, the Freshbook IPO is the most hotly anticipated, having raised $1.03 billion and joining  Nasdaq on Wednesday with a $10.13 billion valuation. The company has priced 28.5 million shares at $36 per share.“If you asked me, did we know that we are going to go public in the U. S. or we will become this successful, I would have said absolutely no,” Mathrubootham, 46, tells Forbes. Now headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks serves 50,000 customers in 120 countries. It’s expanded offerings explain excitement around its IPO. Along with turn-key customer service software, the four-time list maker on the Forbes Cloud 100 offers a full suite of enterprise tech software tools supporting sales, productivity, marketing, human resources and IT.“Our mission is very clear,” Mathrubootham says. “We want to make it fast and easy for every business to delight their customers and their employees.” As Freshworks enters what the company estimates as a $120 million market, it faces heavyweight competition. Key rival Salesforce generates $21 billion in annual revenue. Zendesk, Oracle, Atlassian and Microsoft are also in the mix. Mathrubootham doesn’t fear the competition. “We truly believe that the world of CRM (customer relationship management technology) needs a refresh, pun intended. Plus, it’s a huge market,” he says. It’s a huge step for an Indian enterprise software company to go public in the U. S., says Shekhar Kirani, a partner at Accel, one of the initial investors in Freshworks. “When Freshworks started there were no other global SaaS  tech companies out of India and no mainstream investors were excited,” says Kirani, who loved the product Girish and team had built and invested $1 million funding in 2011. Freshworks now shares the India startup spotlight with 100 unicorns, according to  Credit Suisse.


All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aayuship...


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