Girish Mathrubootham

Girish Mathrubootham, the co-founder and CEO of Freshworks, is a visionary in his field who has been setting the direction for the company since its inception. His company provides businesses with software solutions for customer engagement and retention. 

He holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering in Electrical and Electronics from Shanmugha Arts Science Technology & Research Academy and an MBA (Marketing) at the University of Madras.

The Freshworks founder is also a member of the Product Council for NASSCOM, the trade association of Indian software companies. He has also personally invested in over 60 startups since launching and scaling Freshworks.

The Freshworks Story

Prior to founding Freshdesk, Girish was the VP of Product Management at ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corp, where he set product strategy and oversaw customer support as well as marketing and product management. He gained experience building on-premise help desks.

When US-based customer services software company Zendesk increased its prices and met with dissatisfied customers, Girish saw an opportunity: he thought he could take on the competition by launching Freshworks.

Freshworks launched with a single product in customer support and was an instant success. Between 2011 and 2015, the company targeted thousands of SMEs which paid them $150 on average per month to use its applications for support. Soon enough, thousands of smaller businesses signed into their easy-to-use interface that is intuitive as well. Four years later, the company stood at a multibillion-dollar valuation and is poised to be the first product company from India that could go the IPO route

Today, Freshworks offers customer support, sales software and other solutions to business owners. Their products include Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshservice among others, catering to more than 1,50,000 businesses worldwide including big names like Honda, Cisco, Toshiba, Bridgestone, University of Pennsylvania, and Hugo Boss. Freshworks has expanded from one global enterprise to a range of enterprises since 2015. This includes Burger King and 3M who have been buying 200 or 300 licenses from Freshworks.

The company is headquartered in California with international offices in India, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and Germany. While it has always been an American company, it is firmly rooted in India, with Chennai serving as its R&D hub.

Freshworks IPO

In September this year, Freshworks listed on the NASDAQ (Freshworks IPO date - September 22, 2021). Freshworks is the first Indian-founder-led VC-funded unicorn SaaS company to go public in the US. On day 1 of the Freshworks IPO, the company sold roughly 10% of its stock (about 28.5 million shares), with a listing price of $36 per share.

Acquisitions

• 2015 - 1CLICK – a video, voice and text chat platform
• 2015 - Frilp–a social recommendation app
• 2015 - Konotor–an engagement platform for new mobile users
• 2016 - Framebench–an online collaboration platform
• 2016 - Airwoot–a platform for customer service solutions
• 2016 - Chatimity–a social chat platform
• 2017 - Pipemonk – a data integration startup
• 2017 - Joe Hukum–a chatbot building platform
• 2017 - Zarget – a startup that provides conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools for marketers and designers
• 2019: Natero (analytics service platform), CanvasFlip (SaaS platform forHTML5 animated web content, banners, ads and more)
• 2020: Answeriq (AI-enabled customer support ticket management solution), Flint (IT process automation)

Net Worth

As CEO of Freshworks, Girish Mathrubootham’s net worth is estimated at $700 million. The company reported $250 million in revenue for 2020 and a net loss of $57 million. Upon listing in late 2021, Freshwork’s market value is pegged at $13 billion.

 Podcasts

Founder of Freshworks Girish Mathrubootham shares his story with Accel Partner Anand Daniel on how grew the company to a Series-H stage on the #INSIGHTSPodcast2019 series.

You can listen to the episode here -

‍ Untold Seed Stories: First 500 Days of Freshworks

Learnings on building and scaling Freshworks

“To create a good product, it’s not enough if product managers are on support. Customer support should be on product management too.”

Girish Mathrubhootham, Freshworks CEO