Freshworks IPO Turned Over 500 Employees In India Into Crorepatis: CEO

Indian horizontal SaaS platform Freshworks that listed on Nasdaq yesterday said that over 500 of its shareholding employees in India have become crorepatis following the listing. Globally Freshworks has around 4,300 employees. 

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and cofounder of the company, said that high-quality talent, culture and the desire to build a global B2B tech platform from India have been the three cornerstones of the company’s journey from a startup to a publicly-listed $10 Bn SaaS giant. 

“Today we have 76% of our employees holding shares. More than 500 of our employees in India are crorepatis and 70 of them are under the age of 30- people who have graduated college a few years ago and they fully deserve it for believing in us over the past ten years,” Mathrubootham added.

He sees IPO as his opportunity as a CEO to fulfil the responsibility to current and past employees who believed in Freshworks over the last 10 years and reward them. 

He added that wealth has to be shared with people who helped create it and they earned every bit of it. India being one of the company’s important centres, they will continue hiring here. The number of shareholding employees was higher, at 90% earlier but has come down recently due to aggressive hiring during the past couple of months, he added. 

According to him, Freshworks had the unique strategic advantage of access to top talent in India, across Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which allowed Freshworks to create products at a faster pace and drive innovation.

Founded by Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy in 2010, Freshworks offers a suite comprising software for customer management, which includes an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot and messaging platform for customer support, as well as call centre-based solutions for customer service resolutions.

The platform also allows companies to automate routine, repetitive tasks and manage various HR functions such as hiring, onboarding, and tracking employee data.

Why Freshworks IPO Is India Tech’s Moment

The company became the first Indian SaaS startup to list on Nasdaq and follows the likes of travel companies MakeMyTrip and Yatra on the second largest stock exchange in the world. 

As of December 2020, Freshworks had 11,570 customers, contributing more than $5,000 in ARR, which grew to 13,326, a spike of over 15% by June. Freshworks competes with the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle, SAP, Atlassian among other companies which offer similar IT services management, customer support and CRM solutions, which together offer a $120 Bn market opportunity by 2025, according to IDC.

Freshworks priced its US initial public offering (IPO) well above the target range to raise $1.03 Bn, valuing the company at $10.13 Bn. The Accel and Sequoia Capital-backed company has priced its 28.5 Mn shares at $36 a piece and had earlier expected to raise $969 Mn but adjusted its price band in the run up to the IPO.