Freshworks Inc.
Acquisitions
3
Major Deals Covered
This page covers 3 major deals from 2017 to 2020, each with its price where disclosed and the reason behind it.
| Company | Year | Price | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| AnsweriQ | 2020 | Undisclosed | Acquired Seattle-based artificial intelligence and natural language processing startup AnsweriQ to embed algorithmic customer service automation and auto-triage directly into Freshdesk and Freshchat. |
| Flint | 2020 | Undisclosed | Acquired IT orchestration and workflow automation platform Flint to dramatically bolster Freshservice with no-code hybrid-cloud IT automation. |
| Zarget | 2017 | Undisclosed | Acquired website conversion rate optimization and heatmapping startup Zarget to launch Freshmarketer for digital marketing teams. |
2020
Acquired Seattle-based artificial intelligence and natural language processing startup AnsweriQ to embed algorithmic customer service automation and auto-triage directly into Freshdesk and Freshchat.
Provided the foundational machine learning models that evolved into Freddy AI, automating millions of repetitive tier-1 customer inquiries.
Accelerated Freshworks' transformation into an AI-powered conversational support leader.
2020
Acquired IT orchestration and workflow automation platform Flint to dramatically bolster Freshservice with no-code hybrid-cloud IT automation.
Enabled Freshservice to execute automated cross-platform IT actions across Active Directory, AWS, VMware, and Jira.
Transformed Freshservice into a direct competitor to ServiceNow in the mid-market.
2017
Acquired website conversion rate optimization and heatmapping startup Zarget to launch Freshmarketer for digital marketing teams.
Expanded the Freshworks platform from post-sale customer support into top-of-funnel customer acquisition and marketing analytics.
Broadened Freshworks into an end-to-end customer lifecycle software suite.
Under Dennis Woodside, Freshworks narrowed its focus to service software. It pushes Freshservice upmarket into mid-sized and larger enterprises, cross-sells IT asset management, sells Freddy AI add-ons into the installed base, and relies more on partners and resellers. In 2024 it de-emphasized standalone sales and marketing CRM products to concentrate investment on IT and customer service.
Freshworks sells subscriptions, mostly priced per agent or per user, across tiered plans (Growth, Pro, Enterprise). Revenue comes from two segments: employee experience (Freshservice for IT service management, IT asset management via the 2024 Device42 acquisition, and service management for HR and facilities) and customer experience (Freshdesk ticketing, Freshchat messaging and Freshsales CRM). Freddy AI copilot and AI agent features are sold as paid add-ons. Small customers often start with free trials or self-serve plans; larger mid-market and enterprise deals go through a direct sales team and channel partners. Growth comes from adding seats, upgrading tiers and cross-selling Freshservice to Freshdesk customers.
In June 2024, Freshworks acquired Device42 for approximately $230 million. Device42's advanced IT asset discovery, software license tracking, and application dependency mapping technology was integrated into Freshservice, significantly strengthening Freshworks' enterprise ITSM capabilities.
In 2020, Freshworks acquired Seattle-based AI startup AnsweriQ. AnsweriQ's machine learning and natural language processing models were integrated into Freddy AI to automate ticket triaging, intelligent routing, and agent response recommendations.
Freshworks acquired user experience and interactive prototyping platform CanvasFlip in 2019, bringing specialized product design talent and visual analytics software to enhance the user interfaces across the entire Freshworks product suite.
In July 2020, Freshworks acquired IT orchestration and cloud management startup Flint, integrating its low-code IT workflow automation engine into Freshservice to automate user provisioning, cloud infrastructure restarts, and software access requests.
Freshworks executed strategic tuck-in acquisitions including 1Click.io (co-browsing and video chat in 2015), Konotor (in-app mobile messaging in 2015, which became Freshchat), Framebench (visual collaboration in 2016), and Pipemonk (cloud data integration in 2017).
Freshworks targets acquisitions that bring advanced intellectual property in generative AI, automated IT operations (AIOps), enterprise data discovery, and workflow orchestration, integrating acquired technologies natively onto the unified Freshworks Neo platform.
Freshworks financed the $230 million acquisition of Device42 with cash on hand.
Freshworks is focused on evaluating strategic tuck-in software acquisitions in AI agentic workflows, conversational intelligence, automated customer success analytics, and enterprise service management (ESM).
To aggressively build their "Freddy AI" engine, they executed several highly targeted acquisitions. They bought Flint (IT orchestration) in 2020 and AnsweriQ (machine learning customer service) to ensure their software could automatically resolve massive amounts of customer tickets without human intervention.
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