Freshworks Crosses $300 Million in ARR and Closes 2020 with Over 40% Year Over Year ARR Growth

Freshworks, Inc., the intelligent customer engagement software company, announced it surpassed $300M in ARR, growing the business by 40% year over year through unprecedented economic times. Freshworks’ record year featured new product offerings, strategic acquisitions to accelerate AI and an expanded executive team to fuel its next phase of growth: the march towards the billion-dollar revenue milestone.

“Like everyone, our 2020 plan went out the window when the pandemic hit, but our hard-working team persevered,” said Girish Mathrubootham, Freshworks founder and CEO. “Our mission is to create customers for life and during this past year, this goal was put to the test. Our team rose to the challenge and rallied around our customers to help them navigate unknown waters and empower their employees to respond to increasing customer demands.”

“Freshworks’ impressive growth is not only a testament to the company’s creativity and can-do culture, but also reflects how businesses are looking for new and innovative ways to connect with their customers,” said Sameer Gandhi, partner at Accel. “Freshworks delivers powerful, easy-to-use cloud-based solutions packaged in a flexible and affordable way, which is even more relevant in 2021 and beyond.  As Freshworks first investor, we admire their achievements not only for the past year but throughout their impressive 10-year history, during which they have consistently delivered tremendous value to their customers through an increasing array of inventive products. We know even more history is yet to be written as they continue to fulfill their customer-for-life mission.”

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During 2020, Freshworks also innovated on products, scaled its executive bench and accumulated an impressive list of achievements.

Launched CRM solution to align sales and marketers around customer

Freshworks unveiled Freshworks CRM, a single solution that unifies the customer journey with out-of-the-box capabilities and delivers more personalized conversations at every customer touchpoint for improved business outcomes. The Freshworks CRM solution is built on Freshworks Neo, a new and fundamental reimagining of the platform experience, which aggregates data on an embedded customer data platform for personalized customer engagement, improved lead conversion and sales growth. Neo eliminates the reliance on unwieldy tools and complex multi-stack point solutions that result in data silos that limit artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning‘s (ML) usefulness. With Neo, businesses can quickly and easily craft and extend custom environments via simple clicks to better serve their customers and prospects.

Acquired technologies to fuel AI and automation

Freshworks closed two acquisitions in 2020. The company acquired AnsweriQ, a provider of ML and AI for larger enterprises. AnsweriQ complements Freshworks’ AI engine, Freddy, by enabling enterprise organizations to use existing customer data to scale self-service experiences and automate complex customer workflows. Freddy can now anticipate customer needs, make conversation-based agent recommendations and perform tasks such as refunds and cancellations with no manual input. The technology significantly improves customer experience and frees up agent time to handle more complex requests.

The company also acquired Flint, a leading IT orchestration and cloud management platform, to bolster Freshservice’s IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) capabilities. This acquisition provides greater visibility for IT teams to better manage hybrid infrastructures, optimize spend and automate employee workflows.

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Expanded executive bench for next growth phase

Freshworks hired numerous seasoned tech veterans to provide increased focus and oversight in key areas of the business.  It extended its senior executive team by adding Chief Financial Officer Tyler Sloat (from Zuora, Inc.), Chief Customer Officer Pradeep Rathinam (from AnsweriQ Inc. and Microsoft Corporation), Chief Product Officer Prakash Ramamurthy (from Oracle Corporation) and Chief Revenue Officer José Morales (from Atlassian).

Received global and industry-wide recognition for its solutions and business practices

• Forbes Cloud 100 named Freshworks the #16 top privately-held SaaS company.
• Glassdoor and Battery Ventures named Freshworks a top-25 private cloud company to work for during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Gartner included Freshworks in four Magic Quadrants, recognizing Freshdesk as a Visionary in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center, and listing it in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Tools, 2020 Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management, and the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation reports
• Forrester Research named Freshworks a Strong Performer in The Forrester New Wave: Chatbots For IT Operations, Q4 2020

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