A couple of months ago, this reporter asked Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham if he, too, would offer BMW bikes to rent engineers, something that fintech BharatPe had announced amidst the extreme war for tech talent. “No, we’ll equip them in order that they will buy them on their own,” he responded, without hesitation.
It looks like Mathrubootham may have pulled that off with Freshworks’ Nasdaq listing. The stellar market debut has not only enriched Mathrubootham and early investors like Accel and Sequoia but also turned many Freshworks employees into millionaires.
“Our employees also are our shareholders. This IPO has allowed me the chance to fulfil my responsibility as a CEO to early shareholders, both VC investors and employees, who believed within the dream of Freshworks. we would have liked all the trust and belief of the first employees and investors, who joined us and believed within the dream. As CEO, it’s immensely fulfilling on behalf of me to end my responsibility as I combat the new responsibility of public investors who have now invested within the way forward for Freshworks,” Mathrubootham said in an interview with Moneycontrol hours after ringing the Nasdaq bell.
“Seventy-six percent of our employees hold shares. the amount was higher, at 90 percent, but because we’ve been hiring numerous people recently, it’s 76 percent. For our employees in India, we’ve quite 500 crorepatis and 70 of them are under the age of 30. They passed out of school a couple of years ago and that they fully deserve it,” he added.
Business software maker Freshworks made its trading debut on Wednesday at $43.5 per share on the Nasdaq, up 21 percent from the company’s listing price of $36 per share, giving it a market cap of $12.3 billion.
Freshworks, which is that the first Indian software-as-a-service firm to travel public on the US stock market , was last valued at $3.5 billion, when it raised $150 million in financing from investors like Sequoia Capital, CapitalG and Accel in November 2019.
“I desire an Indian athlete who has won a trophy at the Olympics. We are showing the planet what a worldwide product company from India are able to do . the very fact that we do it first within the US markets is actually amazing. Today is day zero for Freshworks everywhere again and therefore the beginning of such a lot more” Mathrubootham said during the bell ringing ceremony.
How the proceeds will used
Freshworks plans to use the proceeds from the IPO for general corporate purposes, including capital , operating expenses, and cost . it’s going to also use some of internet proceeds to accumulate complementary businesses, products, services, or technologies.This public offering comes amid increased digitisation and growing adoption of remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has seen SaaS IPOs within the US perform spectacularly, popping (rising sharply) and creating billionaires overnight. The listings of Snowflake, Zoom, Cloudflare and Palantir have also sparked a replacement wave of enthusiasm from venture capitalists, private equity funds and hedge funds.
Founded in 2010 by Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy as Freshdesk, the corporate rebranded itself as Freshworks in 2017. It counts the likes of Accel, Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global among its investors. Freshworks claims to possess over 52,500 customers (as of August 31).