Ali Hasan
Get effective CRM solutions by Freshworks
Introduction – Freshworks is a company that wants to support and facilitate you in growing your business without a fuss. If you hate softwares or are simply unhappy, stressed and dissatisfied with them, this is the company that wants to ease out the process for you and make your job easier than before.
Business software is clunky, expensive, hard to setup and frustrating to use. Countless hours are wasted trying to customize these solutions and they often require expensive professional services to get everything to work.
In the end, the solution becomes so complex that businesses need to hire full-time employees to babysit the software. This is where Freshworks comes into the picture as they believe your business deserves better software – software that’s ready to go, easy to setup and use, and requires minimal customization.
Early Days – The Company started as a result of a broken TV. A broken television leads to a distressing experience with a customer service team and this sparked an idea for Freshdesk. Founders Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy begin work on creating a user-focused cloud-based customer service software. Then, Freshdesk was officially incorporated.
Freshdesk is launched from Chennai, India. Four days later, the first customer signs up online from Australia—Atwell College. Freshdesk Inc. rebrands to Freshworks Inc. to reflect its evolution as a products platform.
Later the company acquired many other organizations and expanded into various new categories and as a result they launched CRM softwares and an AI engine to enrich the customer experience and become more even more user friendly.
Marketing Strategy – They market themselves as an Omni channel support system that will help your business to scale faster and will provide you with hassle free solutions to be in touch with your teams as well as your customers.
They market themselves as a company that will provide the following solutions:-
- Monitor customer conversations across email, phone, chat, social media and instant messaging,
- Improve agent productivity with smart automation,
- Deliver better self service experiences through AI chatbots &
- Monitor key performance metrics with powerful analytics.
User Base & Valuation – Today, over 40,000 customers use the services provided by Freshworks to run their business. Quite good for a company that’s only a decade old.
The exact valuation of Freshworks is unknown but they have a post-money valuation in the range of $1B to $10B as of Jul 28, 2020.
Funding – Freshworks has raised a total of $484M in funding over 9 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 1, 2020 from a Secondary Market round. Freshworks is funded by 6 investors. Their investors are as follows:-
- Steadview Capital
- Sequoia Capital
- Tiger Global Management
- Accel
- CapitalG
Revenues – Freshworks surpassed $300 Mn in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a key metric used by software-as-a-service (SaaS) or subscription businesses, in 2020 through Covid-induced unprecedented economic times.
The Silicon Valley-based company’s revenue grew by 40% last year as the pandemic forced companies to adopt digital transformation and strengthen their remote operations through enterprise tech tools.
The customers in health care, education and government contributed to this increase, CEO and founder Girish Mathrubootham said in an interview. It crossed the $100 Mn ARR mark in June 2018 and the $200 Mn mark in November 2019.
Its Indian entity reported a net profit of INR 30 Cr on a standalone basis in FY2019, with a revenue of INR 404.7 Cr.
Acquisitions – Freshworks has made 3 investments. Their most recent investment was on Oct 3, 2019, when Fyle raised $4.5M. Freshworks has acquired 13 organizations. Their other acquisitions are as follows:-
- Flint
- AnswerIQ
- CanvasFlip
- Natero
- Zarget
- JoeHukum
- Chatimity
- Airwoot
- Pipemonk
- Framebench
Controversies – The Company is a decent company but it has been locked and engaged in a legal battle with its rival Zoho.
The controversy started during March 2020 when Zoho charged Freshworks with violating the Defense of Trade Secrets Act and various other U.S. trade laws, stating that Freshworks built its entire business model by stealing Zoho’s sensitive information, including trade secrets such as critical customer data, software products, and even pricing strategy.
Present Time & Future Goals – According to media reports published last year, the company is looking to list itself in the New York-headquartered stock exchange NASDAQ; therefore it needs to create awareness regarding its brand in the US.
The acquisition of AnsweriQ is going to solve that problem with its wide user base. Reports also suggested that Mathrubootham had also moved to the US to prep up for the IPO and keep in touch with the Freshworks’ US headquarters.
Mathrubootham, in a recent interview with Bloomberg, highlighted that the company has no immediate plans to go public as of now, but the option down the road include an initial public offering (IPO), a deal with a special purpose acquisition company, a direct listing or raising more capital from private investors.
“We are readying the company for every possible scenario… All options are now on the table,” he added.
Conclusion – To sum it up, all we can say that, CRM companies like Freshworks have gained a lot of customers as well as market share since the pandemic happened. This is because a lot of businesses are now online and they need online solutions to run smoothly on a regular basis.
This is where companies who provide online solutions come into the picture and help small businesses to grow rapidly. We think that Freshworks have come a long way and if they’re successful in having an IPO at the New York stock exchange, then they can continue their winning streak.
We wish them all the very best for their future. If you liked this content, then stay tuned to StartupTrak and keep coming back for more content.
