Freshworks
More info
- Creator
- Girish Mathrubootham, Shan Krishnasamy
- Released
- 2010
- Type
- SaaS for customer and IT support
An Indian SaaS company that owes its existence to a competitor's price hike.
Girish Mathrubootham was working at Zoho in Chennai in 2010 when he read a forum thread full of Zendesk customers furious about a price increase. That same year he and Shan Krishnasamy started Freshdesk: a ticketing system much like Zendesk, only cheaper. It spread quickly among small businesses worldwide.
More products followed – sales tools, IT service management in the vein of ServiceNow, chat – and in 2017 the company renamed itself Freshworks. Its 2021 Nasdaq IPO made it the first Indian SaaS company to list on a US exchange, and a textbook case of building software for the global market from India without being anyone's subcontractor.