Freshworks Inc. is a marketing technology company that offers innovative customer engagement solutions. Founded in 2010 and based in San Mateo, California, their flagship product, Freshsales CRM, helps businesses manage customer relationships and drive sales effectively.
Publicly traded (FRSH)
Founded: 2010
Headquarters: San Mateo, California, United States
Revenue: 100m_1b
Employees: 1k_5k
Website: https://www.freshworks.com/
Freshworks Inc. (NASDAQ: FRSH) is a publicly traded, cloud-based software-as-a-service company headquartered in San Mateo, California. Founded in 2010, the company develops and sells a suite of products spanning customer experience (CX), IT service management (ITSM), and sales CRM, primarily targeting small and mid-sized businesses. Its product portfolio includes Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, Freshchat, Freshcaller, and Freshmarketer, unified under an AI layer called Freddy.
Freshworks operates across two primary solution lines: Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) [1]. Its CX portfolio includes Freshdesk Omni (an AI-powered omnichannel customer service platform), Freshdesk (ticketing and case management), Freshchat (conversational messaging), Freshcaller (cloud contact center), Freshsales (sales CRM), and Freshmarketer (marketing automation) [2]. Its EX portfolio is anchored by Freshservice, an IT and enterprise service management platform [2]. Across all products, Freshworks has embedded a proprietary AI layer called Freddy, which includes Freddy AI Agent (autonomous ticket resolution) and Freddy AI Copilot (agent assistance) [3]. The company reported its first GAAP-profitable fiscal year in 2025, with net income of $183.7 million on revenue of $838.8 million [4]. As of Q4 2024, the company served over 72,000 customers [5].
Freshworks was founded in 2010 in Chennai, India, by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy — both former employees of Zoho — initially under the name Freshdesk [6]. The company was bootstrapped and then received early funding from Accel Partners [7]. In 2014, it launched Freshservice, an ITSM product, and in 2016 launched Freshsales, its CRM offering [8]. In 2017, the company rebranded from Freshdesk Inc. to Freshworks Inc. to reflect its multi-product ambition [9]. Pre-IPO investors included Accel, Tiger Global Management, CapitalG (Google's venture arm), and Sequoia Capital India, with the company raising approximately $400 million in private funding across nine rounds [10]. On September 22, 2021, Freshworks completed its IPO on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker FRSH, selling 31,350,000 shares at $36.00 per share and generating gross proceeds of approximately $1.128 billion [11], valuing the company at roughly $10.1 billion at listing [12]. The IPO made Freshworks the first Indian SaaS company to list on Nasdaq [13]. In 2020, former employer Zoho accused Freshworks of stealing intellectual property; the lawsuit was settled in 2021 [4]. In May 2024, Freshworks acquired Device42, a U.S. IT management firm, for $230 million, and co-founder Girish Mathrubootham transitioned to Executive Chairman as Dennis Woodside was named CEO [14]. In December 2025, Freshworks agreed to acquire FireHydrant, an AI-powered incident management platform, with the deal closing in January 2026 [4].
Freshworks competes in the ITSM and customer support software segments, primarily targeting companies with 250 to 20,000 employees [15]. In July 2026, Gartner named Freshworks a Leader in the 2026 Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Platforms, based on its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute [16]. The company was also included in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Applications in IT Service Management [17]. The ITSM platforms market reached nearly $9 billion in 2025, growing approximately 13.74% year over year, according to Gartner [18]. In 2024, G2 named Freshworks among the top 50 best software companies globally and ranked it second among software companies in India; Freshworks products have earned 4.5 stars from more than 8,730 verified reviews on the platform [19, 20]. Notable enterprise customers cited by the company include Bridgestone, New Balance, S&P Global, Sony Music, Amerisure, and the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team [21]. As of Q4 2024, the EX (primarily Freshservice) business ARR surpassed $400 million, growing 35% year-over-year on a constant-currency basis, while CX business ARR exceeded $360 million, growing 7% year-over-year [22].
In ITSM, Freshservice's most direct competitors include ServiceNow and Jira Service Management (Atlassian) [23]. ServiceNow is positioned as an enterprise-scale platform commanding significantly higher price points and implementation complexity; Freshworks has publicly positioned Freshservice as an enterprise-grade alternative at lower total cost of ownership, targeting companies that want to avoid a ServiceNow-scale implementation [24, 25]. In customer support and CRM, the primary competitive set includes Zendesk, HubSpot Service Hub, Salesforce Service Cloud, Zoho Desk, and Intercom [26]. Third-party analysis identifies Zendesk as the most direct head-to-head competitor to Freshdesk, offering similar omnichannel ticketing depth with a larger ecosystem but at higher price points, while Freshdesk has positioned itself on price and ease of use for SMB-to-mid-market buyers [27]. HubSpot Service Hub competes with Freshdesk in the CX space and differentiates on its native integration with HubSpot's marketing and sales platform [28]. An emerging competitive challenge cited in Freshworks' own Q4 2024 earnings call was pressure from large SaaS vendors, specifically naming ServiceNow [29]. The competitive landscape across both CX and EX categories also increasingly includes AI-native platforms and autonomous support agents [30].