Minnow Freshworks’ IPO plan closely follows SaaS giants Salesforce and Servicenow • The Register

Freshworks, an enterprise application, has applied for an IPO, hoping that its SaaSy software will be comparable to Salesforce.

The CRM expert established in India has issued a Form S-1 registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the proposed initial public offering, and a report earlier this year indicated that the statement could reach a valuation of US$10 billion .

Freshworks specializes in providing CRM external and internal staff services for things such as HR and IT on the same platform, which it claims can simplify deployment.

According to the long history of IPO tradition, the company is still in a loss state. In the six months ended June 30, the loss reached US$9.8 million. To be fair, this was a decrease from US$57.1 million in the same period last year.

It recorded revenue of US$168.9 million in the first half of the year, up from US$110.5 million in the same period last year. In order to provide a perspective, the ubiquitous CRM monster Salesforce just recorded a turnover of $6.34 billion in the second quarter of 2021, a year-on-year increase of 23%.

CEO Girish Mathrubootham and CTO Shan Krishnasamy founded the company in the eastern Indian city of Chennai in 2010, originally named Freshdesk.

It launched its first CRM product in 2016 and was renamed Freshworks a year later. In 2019, it entered Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, presumably a group of elves, goblins and griffins.

According to Crunchbase data, Freshworks has raised a total of $484 million in funding in nine rounds of financing. Their latest funding was raised on January 1, 2020.

In March 2021, it appointed Prakash Ramamurthy, former senior vice president of Oracle, as its chief product officer.

Freshworks’ customers include Bridgestone Tire, publisher Pearson and Swedish online shopping platform Klarna.

say Register Earlier this year, Freshworks vice president and general manager of Europe, John Crossan, believed that the first generation of SaaS applications had become “highly complex, expensive, fragmented, slightly awkward and unable to adapt to business processes.”

Within the organization — employee services — it competes with companies such as ServiceNow, and it competes with Salesforce in terms of providing services to external customers. Crucially, it uses the same platform, Crossan-Salesforce and Oracle veterans-tell us.

“It is a single platform, single code base, pre-built for IT applications and HR application sets or customer application sets. This is why the deployment time is faster, because there are too many beyond-just how we build the solution As far as the plan is concerned, there is great relevance and flexibility in this regard,” he said.

Whether Freshworks will honor its claims is definitely a controversial issue, but Salesforce and ServiceNow can compete in their respective domestic markets. ®