A golden birthday: Turning 13 on the 13th

Reliving memorable moments as Freshworks becomes a teenager

Sanjay GuptaThe Works Contributor

Oct 12, 20235 MINS READ

Age might be just a number, but turning 13 is special: You’re a teenager (!) on the cusp of significant life changes. And the same can be said for companies.

Today is Freshworks’ 13th birthday—and to celebrate, we curated a list of 13 key moments that shaped the company and the people who’ve made it work.

1. The Hacker News article that started it all

Dated May 18, 2010, the headline read: “Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt.” Reading that article and browsing through reader comments, Girish “G” Mathrubootham sensed a huge opportunity to “throw his hat into the ring” and launch a new SaaS customer support product. He recruited Shan Krishnasamy, a colleague at the time, to join his mission as co-founder and CTO and launched Freshdesk on October 13, 2010, from a rented meeting room in Chennai, India.

Shan Krishnasamy (from left, foreground) and Girish Mathrubootham at the latter’s home in Chennai. Day-long power outages were common in those days, and the office didn’t have power backup.

2. Indian product, Aussie customer

The first customer, Atwell College in Australia, signed up for Freshdesk in June 2011 from over 9,000 kilometers away. There was no looking back: It took just 103 days to reach 100 customers. (Legend has it that Girish and Shan had a Plan B if they could not ship the product in nine months. The backup plan? Close shop and return to their previous jobs. Fortunately, they didn’t have to use it!)

3. Notching a scrappy startup win

Before the company secured any outside funding, it proved its chops by winning $40,000 in Microsoft’s BizSpark startup competition in June 2011. While winning the competition wasn’t part of the plan, the money came in handy. Girish and team spent it almost overnight on digital marketing, resulting in a surge in site traffic and customer signups. It also caused a flutter in VC circles.

The Freshdesk founding team celebrating the BizSpark win.

4. First seed fundraising round gets things ‘Accel’erated

In December 2011, VC firm Accel came on board as the first funding partner with a $1 million minority stake in the company. Girish and the company also gained a mentor in Accel partner Shekhar Kirani. The funding enabled Freshworks (then Freshdesk) to hire more staff and move to a new office the following year.

5. Series B sets the stage for bolder moves

On April 26, 2012, the company secured its second funding round, $5 million total. The joint round included further participation from Accel and new partner Tiger Global, expanding the young company’s ambition. CapitalG and Sequoia Capital joined future funding rounds.

6. Opening a Silicon Valley office

From the start, Freshworks had global ambitions. And in the second half of 2014, the company (still Freshdesk at that point) opened an office in San Bruno, California, its first office outside of India. As the company has grown, so has its global footprint, with 13 offices worldwide.

7. First acquisition clicks in

On August 18, 2015, Freshdesk made its first acquisition: video chat and co-browsing platform 1CLICK.io. Other acquisitions followed, with companies like Frilp whose founders reveled in our entrepreneurial culture.

8. Making the move to a multiproduct company with Freshservice

Freshworks has always been a keen observer of how customers use our products, a trait that gave us the insight to launch our second product, Freshservice. Realizing that many Freshdesk customers were using the customer support software for their internal IT teams, we launched Freshservice in January 2014 to “take the boring out of IT.” Today, we have multiple products serving customer service, IT, sales, marketing, and other business teams.

9. New name, new era: Freshdesk becomes Freshworks

On June 7, 2017—six years to the day since the original Freshdesk product launched publicly—we unveiled Freshworks as our new umbrella brand. The objective: Bring together a growing software suite, including Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, and Freshcaller.

“As we expand our vision and build more exciting products, we felt that this was the right time to create a new brand that would allow us to tell our multiproduct story better,” explained Girish.

Girish and Shan with the new Freshworks logo

10. Say that again: $100 million in annual recurring revenue

The month: June. The year: 2018. The ARR: $100 million. The new label: Unicorn.

11. IPO: A new ticker—FRSH—hits the Nasdaq

A common question often arose during internal town halls: When are we going public? The answer arrived on September 22, 2021, when Freshworks debuted on Nasdaq, the first Indian SaaS company to list on the exchange. Girish called it “Day Zero” for Freshworks.

Miles(tones) to go—and a global pandemic to weather.

12. Freshworks kudumba grows to 5,000+ employees

In the first half of 2022, the Freshworks kudumba (Tamil for “family”) passed the 5,000-employee mark. Regardless of the number, our focus on career development remains the same: Help people succeed by continually finding better, more sustainable, more human ways to work.

13. Freddy gets a generative AI makeover

In November 2022, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, thrilling some and spooking others. But Freshworks engineers, who had built AI into Freshworks’ products since 2018, were hard at work behind the scenes. In March 2023, we announced the generative AI enhancements to our AI engine, Freddy, followed by AI-driven features across the product suite in June 2023 and then the new Customer Service Suite in August 2023.