Freshworks Acquires Flint To Strengthen Remote Work Offerings

Chennai and California-headquartered SaaS unicorn Freshworks has announced the acquisition of Pune-based cloud platform Flint for an undisclosed amount. The company said that the acquisition will bolster Freshservice’s IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) capabilities.

As part of the acquisition, Flint cofounders Ankur Gakkhar and Abhishek Pande are leading respective Freshworks’ teams—with Gakkhar spearheading the automation and cloud management product team and Pande heading the platform and technology integration effort.

Founded in 2013, Flint offers an enterprise-grade IT operations system and an intuitively designed dashboard. Flint’s orchestration platform and agnostic integrations automate entire IT and employee workflows and complex IT runbooks like employee onboarding, closed-loop request fulfilments, DevOps pipeline and cloud workload automation, requests or approvals,

Freshworks can now leverage intelligent automation to efficiently provision IT resources, rapidly remediate business-critical incidents and automate workloads using out-of-the-box connectors to many of today’s popular service providers including Microsoft, VMware, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Slack, OneLogin and Okta. 

Currently, Freshworks’ Freshservice helps organizations optimise their IT services and operations. “As part of Freshservice, the acquired Flint technology will also enable insight across infrastructure and apps, maintain service health and optimize cloud delivery and spend,” said Abhishek Pande, cofounder and former CTO of Flint.

Prakash Ramamurthy, CPO at Freshworks said, “IT automation is vital to help accelerate the transition to a remote workforce and resolve service issues faster. With the addition of Flint’s intelligent automation, Freshworks takes the legwork out of tedious, repeatable tasks so IT teams can focus on high impact work while providing an exceptional employee experience.”

Founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy as Freshdesk, the company was rebranded to Freshworks in June 2017. Now, the company is working on creating brand recognition and awareness in the US as it plans to list itself in the New York-headquartered NASDAQ stock exchange.

The company has more than 150K clients across the world, which include NHS, Honda, Rightmove, Hugo Boss, Citizens Advice, Toshiba, Cisco and others. In November 2019, the company announced that it has crossed $200 Mn in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company had managed to hit $100 Mn ARR mark in June last year.

In November 2019, the company also raised $150 Mn in a funding round led by Google at a $3.5 Bn valuation. Freshworks’ existing investors Sequoia and Accel Partners had also participated in the round. 

Freshworks has repeatedly taken to acquisitions to strengthen its product portfolio. Most recently in February, Freshworks acquired Seattle-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup AnsweriQ to complement its own AI engine, Freddy. 

Being the poster boy for Indian SaaS growth, Freshworks is now looking for an IPO and create the next gamechanger for the Indian startup ecosystem. Expected to reach $1 Bn by 2020, the Indian SaaS and enterprise software market currently accounts for 9% of all software sales. 

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