Falling in line with previous speculations, enterprise customer support provider Freshdesk has today minted a fresh $55 million to accelerate growth and scalability. This Series F round of funding was led by Sequoia Capital India in participation with existing investor Accel Partners. These two backers have seen the company grow into this global giant from its infant stage and are still continuing to support its ambitions.
This round of funding from marquee investors comes on the heels of a stable business model, multiple acquisitions, and new product launches, in the past year. Prior to this round of funding, the company had raised $50 million from Tiger Global Management, Google Capital, and Accel Partners. The latest investment bumps the total funds raised by the SaaS company to a whopping $150.5 million. The valuation for this round hasn’t been disclosed but it is said to be over $500 million.
Commenting on this fresh investment, Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk says,
We are excited to have Sequoia Capital India as a new investor, the expertise and the excitement they bring will round out our already world-class team.
With this fresh influx of capital, Freshdesk will continue to invest in product development — specifically its newest products, Hotline.io and FreshService. Freshdesk president Dilawar Syed believes that each of their products has the potential to become a major business down the line, reports TechCrunch.
The company will also utilize a chunk of the money to focus on the acquisition of more innovative tech solutions and expansion of teams across its five global offices in San Bruno, London, Sydney, Berlin, and Chennai.
Commenting on its investment in Freshdesk, Mohit Bhatnagar, Sequoia Capital India’s managing director, says,
We met Freshdesk four years back when it was getting started and have been tracking their progress closely ever since. They have a world-class product vision and Sequoia is delighted to partner with Girish and lead this growth capital round to help scale India’s leading SaaS company.
Sameer Gandhi, Partner at Accel Partners also had something to add on this occasion:
We have been backing Freshdesk since our seed investment. We are excited about Freshdesk becoming one of the global iconic SaaS companies in the future.
Founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, FreshDesk aims to become one of the leading providers of cloud-based customer service software on a global scale. It currently boasts of having a 100k strong customer base, which comprises mostly of small and medium scale businesses, in over 145 countries. The company’s revenues are also growing at a 2.4x pace which puts it in direct competition with other CRM services Zendesk and Salesforce.
Tapping a huge opportunity in the enterprise European market, Freshdesk has recently extended its roots and set up its regional office in Germany. The company has also been on a little acquisition spree in the past twelve months with the most recent ones being in the machine learning segment. It has just recently acquired Chatimity, a social chat platform that develops artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology and Airwoot, a machine learning platform that allows brands to deliver high-speed customer service on social media
