Freshworks valued at $3.5bn after raising $150m Series H

14 Nov 2019

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Salesforce competitor Freshworks will use its latest funding to further the company’s worldwide expansion.

On Wednesday (13 November), California-based SaaS company Freshworks announced that it has raised $150m in Series H funding, giving the business a post-financing valuation of $3.5bn.

The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, CapitalG and Freshworks’ first investor, Accel. In a statement, Freshworks said that the capital will go towards furthering the company’s worldwide expansion, while accelerating investment in its integrated SaaS platform.

Originally set up in Chennai, India, in 2010, Freshworks is now headquartered in San Mateo. The Salesforce competitor has developed a suite of business software apps, including IT ticket-tracking tools, call centre management software and its help desk software, Freshdesk.

The company held its Series G funding round last year, raising $100m and reaching a valuation of $1.5bn, which means that the business’s valuation has risen by 133pc over the last 15 months.

Freshworks has 2,500 employees around the world and around 220,000 clients. The company’s CEO, Girish Mathrubootham, told Indian start-up magazine Inc42 that the company’s annual recurring revenue is around $200m.

The latest funding round will close by the end of the year and is subject to US antitrust regulatory clearance.

Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director of Sequoia Capital India, said: “The CRM [customer relationship management] landscape is littered with solutions that are high on hype and low on results. Freshworks is unique in delivering software that works for end users across the organisation, whether in marketing, sales, support or customer success.

“There’s a reason Sequoia’s teams across India and the US have each independently decided to double down on Freshworks as it expands its footprint from India to global markets. The opportunity has never been greater to align an entire organisation and create a unified customer experience that better understands and meets their ever-changing needs.”

New platform

Along with the funding news, Freshworks also announced the launch of its Customer-for-Life Cloud, which establishes a common data platform across all of the company’s customer engagement products to unify customer information from marketing, sales, support and customer success.

This enables business teams across an organisation to be better informed about their customers.

Mathrubootham said: “Since Freshworks’ founding, we have been at the forefront of democratising software for the entire organisation – and we’re continuing that tradition by using the most advanced cloud technologies to ensure that software delivers for the entire organisation and puts the ‘customer’ back into CRM.

“The Customer-for-Life Cloud enables businesses to sharpen their customer understanding to better predict and enable success, displacing dismal legacy SaaS solutions that have overpromised and underdelivered with eye-popping regularity.”

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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