With a european office in place, multiple acquisitions and new product launches, Freshdesk has been buzzing with growth and rapid scalability. And to cement those ambitions further, the company has now reportedly received close interest from a few global investors, all eyeing a piece of the rapidly evolving Freshdesk.
According to a Livemint report, Customer support solution provider Freshdesk has been approached by several foreign investors looking to buy a stake in the company, said sources close to the development. Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk has confirmed the development but declined to spill any details.
Freshdesk is backed by marquee global investors including Tiger Global, Google Capital and Accel Partners. But, it has also attracted eyeballs of some key US-based strategic investors, who are looking to pump money into the venture at a valuation north of $500 million. The sources also added that,
They could raise up to $100 million and beyond at a very high valuation.
Some of the large investors that have held talks with the company include the likes of Singapore government’s investment arm Temasek.
In an email to Mint, CEO Mathrubootham said that even though the company is not in an active fund-raising mode, but is open to the idea of bringing new investors on-board if a worthy offer comes its way. He also added that the company has seen vested interest from a lot US-based investors, already pumping money into tech startups in India.
It has also garnered interest from certain late-stage investors in Europe. And this was deemed to happen because of the huge market opportunity in the overall SaaS cloud business. Also the company has recently setup its regional office in Germany to enable growth of mid-market and enterprise businesses in Continental Europe
Another reason for the vested investor interest includes the series of acquisitions (five, to be exact) that the company has undertaken in just a small span of 12 months. The company’s latest acquisition was Airwoot, a machine learning platform that allows brands to deliver high-speed customer service on social media by using deep learning.
Founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, FreshDesk aims to become one of the leading provider of cloud-based customer service software globally. With offices in Chennai and San Francisco, it is focused on owning and winning the mid-market space, instead of gunning for the large corporations.
It currently has around 80,000 customers in 145 countries, with over half of them being added in the past 12-14 months. The company’s revenues are also growing at a fast pace, with over 2.4X growth in the last year. The cloud-based service provider is in direct competition with US-based Salesforce and Zendesk.
The company has been doing well and has been seen as a great role model for building global SaaS companies outside the valley. Investors are intrigued by Freshdesk and inbound interest is high for potential investment. The company is well-financed and based on the current burn rate, they have money for more than four years,
adds Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel Partners.
1 comment