Freshdesk marches on, despite distractions of frothy valuations

Tuesday August 11, 2015 , 2 min Read

Girish Mathrubootham’s Freshdesk has become the poster child of enterprise SaaS in India. With over 45,000 businesses in 145 countries using the SaaS-based customer support solution provided by Chennai-based Freshdesk, Girish has proved in a short period of time that Indian technology companies can build world-class products.

Girish founded Freshdesk in mid-2011 with his Zoho Corp colleague Shan Krishnasamy to build a cloud-based customer support platform that could be used by companies of all sizes. Freshdesk has since launched Freshservice, an internal IT helpdesk, and Mobihelp, an in-app support for mobile apps.

Girish, father to two sons and a self-confessed Rajnikanth fan, spoke about the rapid growth the company saw in his keynote address during MobileSparks 2015 earlier this month. Freshdesk’s initial five-member team worked out of a 1,000 sq ft office in Chennai that had all sorts of infrastructure issues ranging from power cuts to lack of water. Today the 475-people strong Freshdesk team works out of a swanky 60,000 sq ft office in one of the tech parks in Chennai.

The company’s dramatic scale up has attracted some serious venture money. The company has so far raised $94 million over six rounds from marquee investors like Tiger Global, Google Capital and Accel Partners. The firm, according to industry sources, was valued at $500 million when it raised $50 million in April. The company has not confirmed this valuation number.

Freshdesk has made a mark in a highly competitive global industry, dominated by Zendesk. The San Francisco-based company had named Freshdesk as one of its top three competitors when it filed for its IPO in 2014. Zendesk has a market cap of almost $2 billion today.

Such recognition has led to the expectation that Freshdesk will become the first Indian ‘Unicorn’, the term used to describe startups that have crossed the $1-billion valuation mark, in the enterprise space.

In a video interview with YourStory during MobileSparks 2015, Girish spoke about his immediate plans for Freshdesk and his views on valuations and the unicorn club.