Freshdesk: How a disgruntled traveller went on to set up a rocking start-up

Freshdesk, a provider of cloud-based customer engagement software, is BS start-up of the year 2016

In 2009, Girish Mathrubootham, who was instrumental in developing four helpdesks for Zoho Corporation, returned to India after a stint in the US. While his luggage was in transit, his television set got damaged and he did not get insurance reimbursement despite running from pillar to post.
 
Twenty-eight e-mail threads and six months later, a bitter Mathrubootham posted his experience on an online forum where expatriates from the US look for support in shifting to India. He got an immediate response from the logistics firm and his complaint was closed within a day, prompting Mathrubootham to start a new company.

 
Mathrubootham also happened to read an article about Zendesk on Hacker News, which claimed that the company had raised prices several-fold in a short period of time, and that it had little competition. This triggered the idea that there was need for a better customer support solution that could scale up with companies as they expanded.
 

Freshdesk was officially launched in October 2010 by Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, co-founder and chief technology officer. It launched its first product in June 2011 and signed up its first customer from Australia online four days later. The same month, Freshdesk won the Microsoft BizSpark Start-up Challenge, with a $40,000 prize.

 
“Our initial scaling was fast. We hit 100 customers in 100 days and 200 customers in 200 days,” recalls Mathrubootham.
 
Freshdesk raised its first round of funding ($1 million) from Accel Partners in December 2011, and immediately after this, there followed a furious spat between market leader Zendesk and Freshdesk. This came about when Zendesk’s CEO allegedly called Freshdesk “a freaking rip-off”, and Mathrubootham’s response in social media created a buzz in the market. It helped Freshdesk draw attention to itself, including from investors who had earlier shown no interest in funding it.
 
The company has grown fast and is touted as the next Indian start-up on the Unicorn list. It raised Series F funding of $55 million in November 2016, which took its total fund-raising to some $149 million. The investors who injected money include Accel Partners, Tiger Global and Google Capital.

 
Starting with one product, Freshdesk has launched multiple products over the years, and it is currently engaged in scaling up its newer products to the level of its first product. It aims to prove that it can be a successful multi-product company. It currently has five products for customer support, customer relations management, an internal IT helpdesk, an in-app chat and support for mobile apps, and a live chat for sales and engagement.
 
After its Series E funding of $50 million — raised from existing investors Accel Partners, Tiger Global and Google Capital in April 2015 — Freshdesk embarked on a series of acquisitions, acquiring seven companies and adding various strengths in a fast-growing technology world. It currently has more than 900 employees globally and helps over 100,000  organisations around the world to offer more personalised support to their customers.

 
Freshdesk’s vision is to be the leading provider of cloud-based customer engagement software. “Our mission is to provide software products for businesses of all sizes and make it refreshingly easy for them to engage with customers. Freshdesk’s products enable teams to collaborate with each other, engage with their customers and provide them with the best experience possible. Our goal is simple — we are building Freshdesk as a company that is loved by employees, customers and shareholders alike, in that order,” says Mathrubootham.