The 13th of the month is a golden birthday: Turning 13

Reliving memorable moments as Freshworks grows up. Turning 13 is special: you're a teenager (!) on the verge of significant life changes. Companies are no different. In honor of Freshworks' 13th birthday, we compiled a list of 13 key moments that have had a profound impact on the company. 

Today is Freshworks’ 13th birthday—and to celebrate, we curated a list of 13 key moments that shaped the company and the people who’ve made it work. Dated May 18, 2010, the headline read: “Zendesk raises their prices 60% to 300%, and users predictably revolt. ” Reading that article and browsing through reader comments, Girish “G” Mathrubootham sensed a huge opportunity to "throw his hat into the ring" and launch a new SaaS customer support product.

He recruited Shan Krishnasamy, a colleague at the time, to join his mission as co-founder and CTO and launched Freshdesk on October 13, 2010, from a rented meeting room in Chennai, India. The first customer, Atwell College in Australia, signed up for Freshdesk in June 2011 from over 9,000 kilometers away.

(Legend states that Girish and Shan had a Plan B if they could not ship the product in nine months. Before the company secured any outside funding, it proved its chops by winning $40,000 in Microsoft’s BizSpark startup competition in June 2011.

In December 2011, VC firm Accel came on board as the first funding partner with a $1 million minority stake in the company. Girish and the company also gained a mentor in Accel partner Shekhar Kirani. The funding enabled Freshworks (then Freshdesk) to hire more staff and move to a new office the following year. On April 26, 2012, the company secured its second funding round, $5 million total.

The joint round included further participation from Accel and new partner Tiger Global, expanding the young company’s ambition. From the start, Freshworks had global ambitions. In the second half of 2014, the company (still Freshdesk at that point) opened an office in San Bruno, California, its first office outside of India.

As the company has grown, so has its global footprint, with 13 offices worldwide. On August 18, 2015, Freshdesk made its first acquisition: video chat and co-browsing platform 1CLICK. Other acquisitions followed, with companies like Frilp whose founders reveled in our entrepreneurial culture.

Freshworks has always been a keen observer of how customers use our products, a trait that gave us the insight to launch our second product, Freshservice. Realizing that many Freshdesk customers were using the customer support software for their internal IT teams, we launched Freshservice in January 2014 to “take the boring out of IT.

” Today, we have multiple products serving customer service, IT, sales, marketing, and other business teams. New name, new era: Freshdesk becomes Freshworks. On June 7, 2017—six years to the day since the original Freshdesk product launched publicly—we unveiled Freshworks as our new umbrella brand.

“As we expand our vision and build more exciting products, we felt that this was the right time to create a new brand that would allow us to tell our multiproduct story better,” explained Girish. Girish and Shan with the new Freshworks logo.

The answer arrived on September 22, 2021, when Freshworks debuted on Nasdaq, the first Indian SaaS company to list on the exchange. Girish called it “Day Zero” for Freshworks. Freshworks kudumba grows to 5,000+ employees.

But Freshworks engineers, who had built AI into Freshworks’ products since 2018, were hard at work behind the scenes. In March 2023, we announced the generative AI enhancements to our AI engine, Freddy, followed by AI-driven features across the product suite in June 2023 and then the new Customer Service Suite in August 2023.

So, at 13 years young, the future looks bright for Freshworks, with innovations like generative AI to help us make life and work easier for tens of thousands of customers and their customers and employees.

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