Freshworks Enters into Unicorn Club at $1.5B Valuation, Raises $100M Led by Sequoia & Accel

California and Chennai-based cloud-based customer engagement software maker, Freshworks has joined the country’s unicorn club with $1.5 billion valuation after raising $100 million in Series G round of funding led by Sequoia capital and Accel Partners with participation from CapitalG (formerly Google Capital). The latest round brings the total amount of capital raised to $250 million, since inception of the company in 2010. 

“When we started Freshworks in 2010, we were a single product company with a goal of offering better, easier-to-use customer service software than what was in the market. We’ve since scaled our company to $100m in annual recurring revenue and built a full SaaS platform where all of our products - like Freshsales, Freshdesk, and Freshservice - work together seamlessly, without requiring additional integration resources or consultants to make the software simply work,” said Girish Mathrubootham, Co-founder and CEO, Freshworks. 

Formerly known as Freshdesk, the company plans to utilise the latest funding for its global expansion as well for investing in its integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

Founded in October 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, the company’s suite of products is designed to work tightly together to increase collaboration and help teams better connect and communicate with their customers and co-workers. Its products include Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, Freshcaller, Freshteam, Freshchat and Freshmarketer. Freshworks has its HQ in San Bruno, California and global offices in India, UK, Australia, and Germany. The company's cloud-based suite is widely used by over 150,000 businesses around the world including the NHS, Honda, Rightmove, Hugo Boss, Citizens Advice, Toshiba and Cisco.

US-based Tiger Global Management is also an investor in Freshworks. In November 2016, it secured $55 million in a Series F funding round led by Sequoia Capital India and existing investor Accel Partners. Before that, it had received $50 million in a Series E funding led by Tiger Global, with participation from Accel Partners and Google Capital.

Freshworks has made nine acquisitions so far. Its most recent acquisition was of the marketing software startup Zarget in August last year.

The company had recently crossed the $100 million mark in annual recurring revenue, led by its flagship support product Freshdesk (Customer Support Software) and continued rapid growth with its Freshservice (IT Service Management Software) and Freshsales (CRM Software) products over the last several quarters. 

Freshworks becomes the fifth company to join the unicorn club this year after Paytm Mall ($1.9B), Byju’s ($1B), Swiggy ($1.3B) and PolicyBazaar who recently got the valuation of $1 billion after raising more than $200 million from investors led by SoftBank Group's Vision Fund. Budget hotel brand OYO is also in talks with China’s internet giant Tencent to raise $300-500 million funding at a valuation of over $2 billion. If the deal comes through, OYO would be the sixth company to join the unicorn club this year.