Valued at $1.5 billion, Freshworks is now a unicorn

Software maker Freshworks became the newest member of India's rapidly growing unicorn club after its latest $100 million funding pushed its valuation to $1.5 billion.

The San Bruno, California-headquartered company joined the ranks of companies such as WeWork, Byju’s, Ola, and Paytm that are valued at a billion or more following the fresh funding round, co-led by marquee investors Accel and Sequoia, with participation from CapitalG, a growth equity fund of Alphabet Inc.

The capital raised in the latest round will be used to speed its global expansion, and on its integrated SaaS (software as a service) platform, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

Freshworks has so far raised $250 million from investors. It provides organisations with SaaS solutions that make it easy for customer support, sales and marketing professionals to communicate effectively with customers for better service and collaborate with team members to resolve customer issues. Over 150,000 organisations worldwide, including Honda, Hugo Boss, Toshiba and Cisco, use Freshworks.

"When we started Freshworks in 2010, we were a single-product company with a goal of offering better, easier-to-use customer service software than what was in the market. We've since scaled our company to $100 million in annual recurring revenue," said Girish Mathrubootham, co-founder and chief executive of Freshworks.

The company has also hired former AppDynamics vice president of finance and treasury Suresh Seshadri as its chief financial officer. Seshadri previously helped prepare AppDynamics for its initial public offering (IPO) before it was acquired by Cisco in 2017.

Accel was the earliest investor in Freshworks (known as Freshdesk then). In 2011, Accel invested $1 million in the company, according to Crunchbase data. Sequoia Capital invested in Freshworks for the first time in 2016 with $55 million in its series F funding round. New York-based hedge fund Tiger Global Management is also an investor in the firm.

"Girish and his team have worked relentlessly to build Freshworks into a leading SaaS company from India–one that is truly global with customers across 126 countries,” said Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director of Sequoia Capital India Advisors.