The Freshworks journey from zero to $100 million

Freshworks is the only home-grown Indian SaaS company to cross the $100 million ARR milestone. How did it get there? What does the future hold?

With a total funding of $250 million and a valuation of $1.5 billion, Freshworks became India’s first SaaS unicorn in August 2018

It expanded from a single help-desk product, Freshdesk, to a full suite of enterprise solutions

The company now services a clientele of over 150,000 businesses across more than 120 countries

How did it get so far so fast? And more importantly, can it now make it to its $1 billion dream?

June 2011.

I first saw Girish Mathrubootham* in June 2011 at a pitch competition in Bengaluru.

Mathrubootham’s startup, Freshdesk, an online customer support service, was a fledgling entity with just six small customers, and at first glance, seemed unremarkable in every way.

But Mathrubootham himself was remarkable—a master storyteller.

Mathrubootham started his presentation by saying how he left his well-paying corporate job at Zoho and plunged into entrepreneurship despite having a family with two small kids to support. He spoke about how a casual comment on HackerNews had sparked off an urge to do something of his own.

AUTHOR

Sumanth Raghavendra

Sumanth is a serial entrepreneur with more than eighteen years experience in running startups. He is currently the founder of Deck App Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup attempting to re-imagine productivity software for the Post-PC era. Sumanth’s columns appear regularly in leading publications. He holds MBA degrees from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, USA.

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