ⓘ Featured image: Freshworks co-founders: Girish Mathrubootham (L) and Shan Krishnasamy
Freshworks (formerly, Freshdesk) on Monday announced that it has raised $85 million from Steadview Capital, a London-based alternative asset management firm. The funding round was actually closed back in January. Freshworks also raised a whopping sum of $150 million in November 2019 in a Series H round led by Sequoia Capital, Accel, and CapitalG.
Freshworks is currently projecting a ‘Customer-for-Life Cloud’ product to enhance user experience. The company highlights that the new product will help organisations to be informed about their customers.
Commenting on the investment round, Ravi Mehta, Managing Director of Steadview Capital in a statement said,
“Overall, Steadview has $2 billion invested in India including both private and public companies and is very excited about the opportunities in the country,”
“We also view Covid-19 as an opportunity to back our companies more strongly. We have added to three of our portfolio companies recently – Nykaa, Chargebee and Observe.ai. At the beginning of the year, we had made an investment in Freshworks. So, we have been fairly active through this period as well,”
“Part of the reason why we are optimistic is, if one were to look at China and the US, growth across internet and software has accelerated. In some sub-sectors such as gaming, online education, and ecommerce, penetration rates that would have been achieved in 2025 will be achieved this year. India is not any different,”
“My sense is that, with regard to our current portfolio, we expect to see at least 6-7 IPOs over the next 2- 3 years. The first of our private company IPOs will likely occur in early 2021 and then we expect a portfolio company will be going public every three to four months or so thereafter,”
“With our ability to invest in both public and private equity, we expect to continue to support our portfolio companies at the IPOs as well as in the public markets,”
