Freshworks, the leading provider of cloud-based business software, today announced the acquisition of Zarget, a leading marketing software startup that provides marketers and designers with a suite of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tools helping them understand how users interact with their websites. This is the ninth acquisition made by Freshworks over the last two years and will help the company focus on building marketing solutions for businesses of all sizes. In July 2017, Freshworks acquired Gurgaon-based Joe Hukum, a platform that helps businesses build their own chatbots.
Zarget’s robust CRO tools help businesses increase orders, customer interactions and signups on their website by providing user metrics and data driven insights. Marketers can take informed decisions based on the insights gained through A/B Testing, Heatmaps, Session Recording, Polls & Feedback and much more. Through this acquisition, Freshworks seeks to further develop Zarget’s marketing suite and provide the team with expertise, technology and operations as well as access to over 120,000 customers.
“At Freshworks, our ambition is to emerge as the de facto cloud-based business software platform for businesses of all sizes,” said Girish Mathrubootham, CEO & Founder of Freshworks. “A growing number of our customers have been asking us to help them in their marketing initiatives. Today, our software powers customer engagement across every aspect of the customer journey, from customer acquisition to customer support. Acquiring Zarget will enable Freshworks to support customers with the pre-acquisition journey as well and truly transform the way our customers attract and engage with their prospective customers. Also, I have known the Zarget team for many years and I am personally thrilled to have them join the Freshworks family and power our expansion into the marketing software category.”
According to Gartner, marketing leaders allocate 27% of their expense budget to technology, equal to 3.24% of overall revenue, compared with CIO technology spend of 3.4% of revenue. Gartner also predicts that CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs by end of 2017, further underlining the opportunity for marketing software and technology vendors.
“We are excited to join Freshworks and it's an incredible honor to be part of a company that has been our role model in many ways. We built Zarget to help marketers make informed decisions on their online properties without the need for deep technical resources or large budgets. Together with Freshworks, we expect to accelerate the digital marketing evolution and help our customers further transform the way they market with combined expertise and solutions,” said Arvind Parthiban, CEO and Co-founder of Zarget.
Zarget was founded in 2015 by Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar with an angel investment from Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham and some of the early Freshdesk employees who were friends of the Zarget founders. Over the next two years, Zarget went on to raise $7.5M in 2 rounds of funding from Accel Partners, Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India. As part of the deal, the angel investors received only their initial investments back without any additional financial returns to avoid any conflict of interest.
For Zarget customers, there will be no impact on their services and Freshworks will continue to support them. Freshworks had announced the acquisition of Joe Hukum last month and with the addition of Zarget, the company continues to focus on building a refreshing suite of SaaS products following its rebrand from Freshdesk earlier this year.
Image: Girish Mathrubootham, CEO & Founder of Freshworks
Zarget’s robust CRO tools help businesses increase orders, customer interactions and signups on their website by providing user metrics and data driven insights. Marketers can take informed decisions based on the insights gained through A/B Testing, Heatmaps, Session Recording, Polls & Feedback and much more. Through this acquisition, Freshworks seeks to further develop Zarget’s marketing suite and provide the team with expertise, technology and operations as well as access to over 120,000 customers.
“At Freshworks, our ambition is to emerge as the de facto cloud-based business software platform for businesses of all sizes,” said Girish Mathrubootham, CEO & Founder of Freshworks. “A growing number of our customers have been asking us to help them in their marketing initiatives. Today, our software powers customer engagement across every aspect of the customer journey, from customer acquisition to customer support. Acquiring Zarget will enable Freshworks to support customers with the pre-acquisition journey as well and truly transform the way our customers attract and engage with their prospective customers. Also, I have known the Zarget team for many years and I am personally thrilled to have them join the Freshworks family and power our expansion into the marketing software category.”
According to Gartner, marketing leaders allocate 27% of their expense budget to technology, equal to 3.24% of overall revenue, compared with CIO technology spend of 3.4% of revenue. Gartner also predicts that CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs by end of 2017, further underlining the opportunity for marketing software and technology vendors.
“We are excited to join Freshworks and it's an incredible honor to be part of a company that has been our role model in many ways. We built Zarget to help marketers make informed decisions on their online properties without the need for deep technical resources or large budgets. Together with Freshworks, we expect to accelerate the digital marketing evolution and help our customers further transform the way they market with combined expertise and solutions,” said Arvind Parthiban, CEO and Co-founder of Zarget.
Zarget was founded in 2015 by Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar with an angel investment from Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham and some of the early Freshdesk employees who were friends of the Zarget founders. Over the next two years, Zarget went on to raise $7.5M in 2 rounds of funding from Accel Partners, Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India. As part of the deal, the angel investors received only their initial investments back without any additional financial returns to avoid any conflict of interest.
For Zarget customers, there will be no impact on their services and Freshworks will continue to support them. Freshworks had announced the acquisition of Joe Hukum last month and with the addition of Zarget, the company continues to focus on building a refreshing suite of SaaS products following its rebrand from Freshdesk earlier this year.
Image: Girish Mathrubootham, CEO & Founder of Freshworks
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