STARTUP SPECIAL.......... Riding the SaaS Wave

Riding the SaaS Wave





An early mover in cloudbased customer support software, Freshdesk has so far had few problems in snaring customers as well as funding

Can the shipment of a broken TV in spire somebody to start a company?
Well, this is what happened to Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder of Freshdesk, a cloud-based helpdesk software company with offices in Silicon Valley, Chennai, London and Sydney.

In mid-2010, Mathrubootham was moving back to India from Texas and had shipped all his belongings back home. Two months later, when the shipment arrived in Chennai, he found the screen of his LCD TV broken.After trying in vain for six months to get compensation, Mathrubootham vented his angst online. It did wonders; Girish got his money back. “I saw the need for a better customer support solution,“ he recalls.

While the inspiration for Freshdesk was a nightmarish consumer experience, the trigger to take the entrepreneurial plunge was the news of an up to 300% hike in prices announced by Zendesk, a provider of cloudbased customer services based out of San Francisco. Mathrubootham, then vice-president of product management at Zoho, a suite of online productivity tools and SaaS (Software as a Service) applications, saw the potential to build a SaaS-based help desk software and sell it to customers globally.He roped in friend and colleague Shan Krishnasamy, and Freshdesk was born in October 2010.

“A key transformational moment in my career is that I understood the importance of riding a wave,“ reckons Mathrubootham.The SaaS wave was just taking shape in India, venture capital investors were actively tracking the space and Mathrubootham knew that funds could be raised if he showed early momentum. Freshdesk did achieve early traction, and it was in large measure due to carefully orchestrated product positioning -as good as Zendesk, but cheaper and more intuitive than its bigger rival. In November 2011, Freshdesk raised a Series-A round, its first, of $1 million from Accel Partners. In April next year, it raised its second round of funding of $5 million, and over the next eight months managed to get over 3,000 enterprise customers.

Five years down the line, Freshdesk has over 50,000 customers across 120 countries, an employee headcount of over 550, and has had five rounds of funding. It has raised $93 million from Accel Partners, Tiger Global and Google Capital, and has seen its valuation grow three times each year over the last three years.

The company is well poised to take the next big leap, with an eye on the massive and untapped international small & medium enterprises market. The startup has shown its aggressive growth streak by acquiring a series of companies over the last few months. While it bought Konotor, a mobile-first user engagement platform, in mid-December, it acquired video chat and cobrowsing platform 1CLICK and social recommendation app Frilp in August and October, respectively.

Ask Mathrubootham whether the startup has the unflinching support of the investors, and he sounds confident. “VCs always invest in good companies with solid metrics, both in good as well as bad times,“ he contends, adding that Freshdesk has been generating revenue since the first day and investors are extremely happy with its growth and sustainability.

ETM3JAN16