- Customer engagement software company Freshworks announced it has raised $150 million in Series H funding at a post-financing valuation of $3.5 billion
Customer engagement software company Freshworks announced it has signed definitive agreements for a $150 million Series H round of funding at a post-financing valuation of $3.5 billion. This round of funding was led by existing investors Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, and Accel.
With this round of funding, Freshworks plans to expand to more countries and accelerate investment in its integrated SaaS platform. Freshworks also launched Customer-for-Life Cloud, which establishes a common data platform across the company’s customer engagement products to unify important customer information from marketing, sales, support, and customer success to enhance the customer journey. This financing is expected to close by the end of the year and it is subject to customary closing conditions, including U.S. antitrust regulatory clearance.
“Since Freshworks’ founding, we have been at the forefront of democratizing software for the entire organization – and we’re continuing that tradition by using the most advanced cloud technologies to ensure that software delivers for the entire organization and puts the ‘customer’ back into CRM,” said Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham. “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 over-promised and underdelivered with eye-popping regularity.”
Mathrubootham got the idea for Freshworks back in 2010 while moving back to India from Austin, Texas where he worked for Zoho. During the moving process, his TV was damaged by the moving company and he did not get a solution after filing a complaint. After sharing the negative experience in an online forum, the moving company reimbursed him for the damaged TV.
With the Customer-for-Life Cloud, business teams can become better informed about their customers and proactively act to increase satisfaction and lifetime value from first touch to latest interaction. And the Customer-for-Life Cloud enables customers to access a 360-degree view of their customers’ data across sales, marketing, support and success thus accelerating and improving a business’s ability to efficiently respond to customer inquiries and take advantage of additional sales opportunities. And teams across the enterprise will be able to move beyond simple customer ratings to actionable recommendations based on customer success data, increasing account-wide satisfaction, retention, and upsell opportunities.
“The CRM landscape is littered with solutions that are high on hype and low on results,” added Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India LLP. “Freshworks is unique in delivering software that works for end users across the organization, 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 organization and create a unified customer experience that better understands and meets their ever-changing needs.”
One of Freshworks’ largest rivals is Salesforce. But Accel partner Sameer Gandhi — who led this funding round — pointed out that the CRM market has plenty of room for other companies to grow.
“We really think Freshworks can be incredibly successful in this market, and it doesn’t have to be at the expense of a Salesforce. Frankly, there’s a lot of other vendors out there too,” explained Accel partner Sameer Gandhi in an interview with Business Insider.
The Freshworks platform is better equipped for small to medium-sized businesses. Currently, Freshworks has about 250,000 customers. And many of them are SMBs. But some of the larger companies that use the Freshworks platform include Bridgestone, DISH, Sling, and Vonage.
Freshworks is headquartered in San Mateo, California, but most of its employees are based in India. And Freshworks has offices in 10 other cities like London, Berlin, Sydney.
