companies

Freshworks

Public SaaS company behind Freshdesk and Freshsales, using its Freddy AI brand to add copilots and autonomous agents across support and sales.

Freshworks was founded in Chennai, India, in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, both former Zoho employees, initially as the help-desk product Freshdesk. The company expanded into a broader suite covering sales (Freshsales), IT service management (Freshservice), and marketing, moved its headquarters to San Mateo, California, in 2018, and became the first Indian-origin SaaS company to list on Nasdaq, debuting under the ticker FRSH in September 2021 at a roughly $13 billion valuation. Freddy is Freshworks' umbrella brand for AI across the suite, spanning Freddy AI Agent for automated customer and employee support conversations, Freddy Copilot for assisting human agents mid-ticket, and Freddy Insights for analytics. The company has pushed the Freddy line toward autonomous resolution, citing internal figures of AI agents resolving roughly a quarter to a third of support requests without human handoff. Dennis Woodside, previously an executive at Google and COO at Dropbox, became CEO in May 2024, with co-founder Girish Mathrubootham transitioning to executive chairman before departing the company roughly four years after the IPO. Freshworks now employs several thousand people globally and competes with Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud primarily on price and ease of setup for mid-market customers.

Founded

2010

Headquarters

San Mateo, United States

Sector

applications