Freshworks, an Indian horizontal SaaS platform that debuted on NASDAQ yesterday, announced that over 500 of its shareholder personnel in India have become crorepatis as a result of the IPO. Freshworks employs over 4,300 individuals worldwide.
Girish Mathrubootham, the company’s CEO and co-founder remarked that high-quality talent, culture, and the ambition to establish a global B2B tech platform from India have been the three pillars of the company’s evolution from a startup to a publicly-traded $10 billion SaaS giant.
He further added, “Today we have 76 percent of our employees holding shares. More than 500 of our employees in India are crorepatis and 70 of them are under the age of 30 people who have graduated college a few years ago and they fully deserve it for believing in us over the past ten years.”
The company was valued at $12.2 billion after opening at a price that was 21 percent more than the initial offering price of $36 per share. Freshworks’ shares started at $43.5. On September 22, the stock touched an intraday high of $48.75. The company raised $1 billion by offering 28.5 million common shares. The offering started trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Wednesday under the symbol ‘FRSH,’ and it is projected to close on September 24, 2021.
Freshworks had previously announced its plans to offload shares at a price range of $32-34 per share, up from $28-$32 per share. It has offered the underwriters a 30-day option to acquire up to an additional 2,850,000 shares of Class A common stock at the IPO price, excluding underwriting discounts and commissions. The company became the first Indian SaaS startup to debut on Nasdaq, joining travel firms MakeMyTrip and Yatra on the world’s second-largest stock exchange.
Freshworks secured $150 million in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, and Accel in November 2019 at a $3.5 billion valuation. The company also counts Steadview Capital and Tiger Global Management as investors.
Freshworks expects to use the capital from the offering to acquire complementary businesses, products, services, or technology. A chunk will also be used for common corporate purposes such as working capital, operating expenses, and capital expenditure.
Freshdesk, founded in 2010 by Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, began as a helpdesk software for customer service. In June 2017, it chose to rebrand as Freshworks to showcase the company’s exponentially growing software portfolio. Freshworks claims to have around 52,500 customers globally and recorded $169 million in revenue in the first half of 2021. The company’s revenue has increased by almost $60 million since the first half of 2020.