California and Chennai-based Freshworks, a enterprise software product-based startup, has raised fresh $100 million in a series G round of funding co-led by its existing investors Sequoia and Accel Partners, with participation from CapitalG, a late-stage growth fund of Google's parent firm Alphabet.

With is funding, Freshworks is now valued at $1.5 billion.

Earlier in November 2016, the company was valued at $750 million when it had raised $55 million from Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners. With today's funding round the total funding raised by the company brings to mere $250 million -- to become India's first Unicorn in enterprise software segment.

In addition to funding, Freshworks also announced that it has hired a former AppDynamics VP of finance and treasury Suresh Seshardi, who helped AppDynamics prepare for its IPO. AppDynamics however got acquired by Cisco instead of going IPO.

Additionally, the company also said that it has scaled to $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Interestingly, Freshworks co-founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham indicated that Freshwworks may prepare for going IPO (which might be reason of hiring AppDynamics' Seshardi) and this funding will likely be the last private funding round for the company.

“Freshworks hasn’t started the IPO process but we do feel that we will eventually go public in the U.S.,” he said to TechCrunch.

“With that said, our primary focus right now is on growing the business and investing in our platform. When the timing is right, we’ll make that decision," added Mathrubootham.

Founded out of Chennai in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, Freshworks was earlier known as Freshdesk until it re-branded last year to reflect an expansion beyond its core helpdesk product. Now, Freshworks is the parent company behind its several enterprise software products which includes Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, Freshcaller, Freshteam, Freshchat, and Freshmarketer.

The company's cloud-based suite of SaaS products is widely used by over 150,000 customers around the world including Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, Toshiba and Cisco.

With offices in California, London, Berlin, and Sydney, a larger chunk of Freshwork's employees are based out of Chennai, India, where it claims around 1,400 people working on product development.

Moreover, the company has also made a substantial amount of acquisitions in span of just two years. Freshwork's last acquisition was in August last year when it made its ninth 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.

A month prior to that, it had a href="http://indianweb2/2017/07/20/freshworks-freshdesk-acquires-gurgaon-based-chatbot-startup-joe-hukum/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">acquired Gurgaon-based Joe Hukum, a platform that helps businesses build their own chatbots.

Source - Techcrunch | Business Insider
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