A Salesforce competitor just raised $100 million from Silicon Valley investors to become India's first enterprise software unicorn
- Freshworks, an India-based sales and customer service software company, announced a $100 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation.
- This makes it one of India's first unicorns - and the country's only unicorn in the enterprise software space.
- The funding was led by Accel and Sequoia with participation from Google's CapitalG.
Like many startup founders, the trajectory of Girish Mathrubootham's career changed because of an aha moment.
The Chennai, India-based Mathrubootham had just moved back home after living some time in Austin, Texas. A television he shipped during his move arrived broken, and he wasn't having any luck getting through to customer service to get reimbursed for his troubles.
As these stories go, Mathrubootham knew there had to be a better way to get customers in touch with the companies that serve them. So he co-founded Freshworks - then known as Freshdesk - to do just that.
"When we started Freshworks in 2010, we were a single product company with a goal of offering better, easier-to-use customer service software than what was in the market," Mathrubootham said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Freshworks announced $100 million in funding from Silicon Valley investors Accel and Sequoia, with participation from Google's CapitalG. The company is now valued at $1.5 billion, making it the first enterprise software unicorn to ever come out of India, according to the company.
And in June, the company announced another milestone: $100 million in annual recurring revenue, thanks to customers like Honda and Cisco.
While India has deep connections to the US tech industry, so far it has yielded very few globally successful startups. One major exception to that is Flipkart, an e-commerce company which sold to Walmart for $16 billion in May.
But Freshworks investors think the 8-year-old startup - which positions itself as a low-cost alternative to customer service, sales and marketing platforms such as Salesforce and ServiceNow - could prove an exception to the rule.
"Sequoia first backed Freshworks in 2016 and didn't hesitate for a moment to double down on the investment," Sequoia investor Mohit Bhatnagar said in a statement. "Girish and his team have worked relentlessly to build Freshworks into a leading SaaS company from India - one that is truly global with customers across 127 countries."