WestBridge Capital Offloads 2% Stake In Freshworks

Private equity (PE) firm WestBridge Capital Management sold 2.75 Lakh shares of Nasdaq-listed SaaS company Freshworks in the quarter ended September 2024. 

As per its SEC filings, the India-focused investment firm dumped 2% of its stake in Freshworks during the July-September period. WestBridge owned 13.6 Mn shares of Freshworks at the end of June 2024, which fell to 13.3 Mn at the end of September. 

With this, WestBridge Capital’s current shareholding in the SaaS major has fallen to a little over 4%, worth nearly $221 Mn at the stock’s closing price of $16.54 on Thursday. 

WestBridge Capital has so far backed multiple Indian startups like Meesho, Rapido and PhysicsWallah. 

Freshworks, founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy, offers a suite of software for customer service and support, customer engagement and IT service management. 

Competing with the likes of Zoho, Hubspot, Salesforce and Microsoft, Freshworks made its debut on Nasdaq in 2021. The SaaS major is also backed by the likes of investment giants Vanguard, BlackRock and Peak XV Partners among others. 

In May, Freshworks CEO Mathrubootham stepped down from his role and was redesignated as executive chairman.

Earlier this month, the company announced that it will layoff 13% of its global workforce as part of a restructuring plan to streamline operations and increase operational efficiency. The job cuts are expected to impact about 660 employees.

Along with this, the company also announced that its board approved a stock buyback programme worth $400 Mn of its outstanding Class A common stock.

Freshworks narrowed its consolidated net loss by 3.5% to $29.95 Mn in the third quarter of 2024 from $31.03 Mn in the year-ago period. Total revenue jumped 21.4% to $186.6 Mn during the quarter under review from $153.6 Mn in the same quarter last year.