Freshworks Inc.
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Company History
Founded 2010 in San Mateo, California, United States
The inspiration for Freshworks came from a frustrating personal customer service experience in 2009 in Chennai. Girish Mathrubootham, then an executive at software firm Zoho, moved his household goods back to India from an overseas assignment. A television was delivered completely broken, and Mathrubootham spent months trapped in an unhelpful email and phone loop with the shipping company, receiving zero resolution. Soon after, he read an online article on Hacker News announcing that customer support software Zendesk had raised its subscription prices by up to 300%, causing widespread customer outrage. Recognizing an opportunity to build a customer-first, affordable cloud ticketing tool, Mathrubootham joined forces with his former engineering colleague Shan Krishnasamy. In October 2010, they set up an 800-square-foot office in Chennai with six engineers, launching Freshdesk and winning their very first paying customer—an Australian college—within months.
Girish Mathrubootham is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Freshworks Inc., having served as founding CEO from 2010 to 2024. Mathrubootham pioneered the Indian SaaS movement, proving that world-class enterprise software could be engineered in Chennai and sold globally over the internet. He steered Freshworks through its landmark 2021 NASDAQ IPO, becoming one of India's most celebrated corporate leaders.
Shan Krishnasamy is the co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Freshworks. Krishnasamy architected the original Freshdesk ticketing platform in 2010 and designed the scalable multi-tenant infrastructure that allowed Freshworks to onboard tens of thousands of business clients with high uptime and low infrastructure overhead.
Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy founded Freshdesk in an 800 sq ft office in Chennai, building an affordable cloud customer ticketing system.
Won its first commercial customer in Australia and secured $1 million in Series A funding from Accel India.
Introduced Freshservice to provide internal IT helpdesk and service management, which rapidly expanded into its largest enterprise revenue engine.
Rebranded from Freshdesk to Freshworks to reflect its multi-product suite spanning customer support, IT service, and sales CRM.
Surpassed a $1.5 billion valuation following a $100M round led by Accel and Sequoia Capital, establishing dual headquarters in San Mateo and Chennai.
Became the first Indian SaaS company to list on NASDAQ under ticker FRSH, raising $1.03B at a peak valuation of over $12 billion.
Unveiled Freddy AI, embedding generative AI across Freshservice and Freshdesk to automate ticket summaries, responses, and routine IT tasks.
Dennis Woodside appointed CEO while founder Girish Mathrubootham transitioned to Executive Chairman to focus on product strategy and long-term vision.
Surpassed $750 million in annual revenue, delivering over $150 million in annual free cash flow across 68,000+ paid business customers.
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.
Acquired IT orchestration and workflow automation platform Flint to dramatically bolster Freshservice with no-code hybrid-cloud IT automation.
Acquired website conversion rate optimization and heatmapping startup Zarget to launch Freshmarketer for digital marketing teams.
Since its establishment in 2010, Freshworks Inc. expanded from an early-stage venture into a recognized leader in Enterprise SaaS, Customer Service Software, IT Service Management (ITSM) & CRM, overcoming key market challenges.
Over its history, Freshworks Inc. executed decisive strategic pivots toward scalable monetization and digital distribution, securing its current market leadership.
By continually modernizing operations and embracing workflow automation, Freshworks Inc. maintains resilience through changing technological and economic cycles.