A famous Indian SaaS (software-as-a-service) firm named Freshworks made its trading debut in the US stock exchange Nasdaq on Wednesday. The firm has an estimated value of $12.2 billion after it opened 21% above the initial offering price of $36 apiece.
The Freshworks shares opened at $43.5 and their stock hit was around 48.75 on September 22. The company sold 28.5 million common shares, which helped them to raise $1 billion in proceeds.
Girish Mathrubootham, in interviews given by him to several media outlets, spoke about all of their initial public offering (IPO) made a lot of money for its employees as more than 500 of its employees turned millionaires. He further said that about 70, of these 500 employees, are under the age of 30. Later he added “I feel like an Indian athlete who has won a gold medal at the Olympics. We are showing the world what a global product company from India can achieve.” After raising around $ 150 million, the value of the company was raised high up to the amount of $3.5 billion. It received funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, and Accel in November 2019. The company is also helped by Steadview Capital and also by Tiger Global Management.
As per their plans, they will use the proceeds from the offering to acquire complementary businesses, products, services, or technology. A portion of it will also be used for general corporate purposes. These general corporate purposes mainly consist of working capital, operating expenses, and capital expenditure.
The company was founded by Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy as Freshdesk back in the year 2010. The company, in the beginning, was only working as a help desk software. The main motto of the company in its beginning days was just to work for customer support and provide services to the customers contacting them. It later came up with a plan to rebrand itself to Freshworks in June 2017 to incorporate the company’s growing software suite.
As the company claims, it has more than 52,500 customers across the globe. Also as per the reports, the company is reported to have a revenue of $169 million. It had it in the first half of 2021 itself. Compared to the first half of 2020, the company’s revenue has seen major growth and it is high up to $60 million.
