Refreshing Cloud Apps

Freshworks is zeroing in on a market dominated by SAP and Salesforce.

- Anuradha Raghunathan

Cloud services giant Salesforce faced an unlikely gatecrash-er at its annual Dreamforce convention last September: a blimp floating above its eponymous tower in downtown San Francisco emblazoned with the slogan #failsforce. In case anyone missed the message, a marching band, and a “hit refresh” lounge was stationed at street level urging customers to look for affordable alternatives. The message was also beamed across billboards, banners as well as digital and radio ads.

Behind the stunt was nine-year-old Freshworks, an up-and-coming rival to Salesforce founded and run by 44-year old Girish Mathrubootham. Last May, the company bombarded rival ServiceNow’s annual convention in Las Vegas with walking billboards and taxi banners around the city. It also served free coffee and breakfast to participants outside the venue. “We are on a mission to put easy-to-use business software in the hands of the people who need it,” says Mathrubootham. “It’s time for a change. You don’t need expensive and bloated cloud software.”

Already a hit among small and midsized enterprises, Freshworks is out to grab more of the large companies that now rely on bigger players such as SAP and Salesforce in a global market for cloud application services that market researcher Gartner says will top $117 billion by 2021. To do that, Freshworks raised an additional $100 million in July from existing investors Accel, Sequoia and CapitalG, a fund run by Google parent Alphabet, in a deal that valued Freshworks at $1.5 billion. Profitability can wait, says Mathrubootham: “I can be profitable if I want to. But if I am not growing enough it may be a lost opportunity when the competition grabs it.”