Freshworks Sees Another Top-Level Exit; Now, CRO Pradeep Rathinam Quits

SUMMARY

Rathinam has been replaced by Abe Smith, who has been hired as the new global field operations leader

Rathinam, who founded AnsweriQ, an AI-based customer service automation company, joined Freshworks in 2020

The announcement comes as the SaaS unicorn reduced its net loss by 49% in Q4 2023 to $28.1 Mn from $55.5 Mn in the same period of 2022

NASDAQ-listed Indian SaaS unicorn Freshworks’ chief revenue officer (CRO) Pradeep Rathinam has resigned from his post after nearly four-year stint. He will be replaced by Abe Smith who has been tapped as the new global field operations leader.

Smith is a sales executive with nearly 25 years of global experience at Zoom, Oracle and Cisco and will lead the team to scale the business.

“Rathinam, our CRO, will be departing Freshworks at the end of this month. He stepped up to lead and stabilise our go-to-market teams during a transition period and delivered a strong Q4 to finish out the year,” said Dennis Woodside, president, Freshworks, during the company’s fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call.

Rathinam, who founded AnsweriQ, an AI-based customer service automation company, joined Freshworks in 2020 after the acquisition of his company. Initially serving as the chief customer officer, he was later appointed as the CRO by the Board of Directors on April 27, 2023.

Before AnsweriQ, Rathinam served as the CEO of Aditi Technologies and spent more than a decade at Microsoft in the role of general manager for the independent software vendors business.

There has been a slew of management changes within the SaaS firm. It recently appointed former Adobe and F5 executive Mika Yamamoto as its first chief customer and marketing officer (CCMO).

Rathinam’s resignation also comes as Freshworks saw the exit of its cofounder and CTO Shan Krishnasamy in September 2022. The SaaS unicorn has also fired tens of employees across three rounds of layoffs since mid-2022.

Founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy, Freshworks offers a suite of software for customer service and support, customer engagement and IT service management. The company went public in 2021.

Freshworks competes with the likes of Zoho, Hubspot, Salesforce, Microsoft and many other Indian and international tech majors.

The SaaS unicorn narrowed its net loss by 49% in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2023 to $28.1 Mn from $55.5 Mn in Q4 of 2022.

The company has posted a revenue of $160.1 Mn for the quarter, 20% higher than $133.2 Mn in the same period last year.