Freshworks Inc. (Freshworks) operates as a software development company that provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that provide people-first, AI service software that organizations use to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences.
The company provides its solutions in two product families: Customer Experience (CX), and Employee Experience (EX). CX products include Freshdesk, Freshdesk Omni, Freshchat, Freshsales, and Freshmarketer. EX products include Freshservice, Freshser...
Freshworks Inc. (Freshworks) operates as a software development company that provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that provide people-first, AI service software that organizations use to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences.
The company provides its solutions in two product families: Customer Experience (CX), and Employee Experience (EX). CX products include Freshdesk, Freshdesk Omni, Freshchat, Freshsales, and Freshmarketer. EX products include Freshservice, Freshservice for Business Teams, and Device42. The company’s generative AI offerings, Freddy AI Agent and Freddy AI Copilot, further enhance the customer, and employee experience. Freddy AI Agent offers always-on, autonomous, personalized resolutions to customer and employee queries. Freddy AI Copilot provides always-on contextual assistance for customer support, employee support, marketing and sales use cases, designed to boost productivity. Over 72,000 companies use Freshworks' uncomplicated solutions to increase employee efficiency and customer loyalty.
The company’s solutions and platform are enterprise-grade without the enterprise complexity. The company’s fresh approach to EX and CX software is designed to be easy to use and ready to scale and to deliver rapid time to value to companies of all sizes. With an increased ability to delight customers and employees, Freshworks' customers have improved retention, achieved higher customer satisfaction scores, and better business outcomes.
The company’s secure and native AI enables businesses to stay ahead of the curve with the latest technologies and is designed to deliver a tangible return on investment. Built to deliver exceptional customer experiences and employee experiences, Freddy AI has helped users in customer support and IT autonomously resolve service requests.
Businesses from approximately 170 countries around the world use Freshworks products to delight their customers and employees every day. The company provides products across multiple markets to address the needs of businesses of all sizes that need to digitally transform to delight their customers and employees.
Business Model
Product-led growth (PLG) is the core foundation of Freshworks and has helped the company serve organizations of all sizes. The simplicity and powerful functionality underpinning the company’s Freshworks solutions act as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion by driving trials of the company’s products that it supplements with its inbound and outbound sales motions. The company’s pricing is transparent, affordable, and easy to understand, reducing the length of sales cycles and increasing the efficiency of marketing, and sales. This enables the company to disrupt the traditional top-down sales motion, letting users, not executives, designate Freshworks as their software of choice.
The company’s go-to-market approach allows it to respond to how businesses want to buy the company’s products. This flexible approach capitalizes on the strong user-driven adoption and user love for the company’s products with a dedicated focus on driving successful adoption and expansion within organizations and divisions of large organizations. The company offers its products under both free and paid subscription plans, further reducing friction to adoption and accelerating the company’s go-to-market motion.
The company focuses its go-to-market motion on businesses based on their size:
Small- and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMB) (organizations with 250 or fewer employees): The company services its SMB customers through inbound and partner demand generation, which is low-cost, low-touch, and self-service.
Mid-Market (organizations with 251 to 5,000 employees): The company services its mid-market customers through inbound, outbound and partner demand generation.
Enterprise (organizations with 5,001 or more employees): The company services its enterprise customers through inbound, outbound and partner demand generation. The company focuses on serving divisions or departments within enterprises.
The company has three go-to-market motions to attract customers:
Inbound Motion: The company’s inbound motion is the primary way its sells to organizations, regardless of the organization’s size or industry. The company relies on efficient search marketing and word of mouth to encourage individual users or small teams within an organization to discover, try, and purchase the company’s products. The company drives potential customers to its website as the primary channel to learn about its solutions and the company offers 14-day free trials of its products, giving potential customers flexibility to try before they buy.
Outbound Motion: This approach is focused on mid-market and enterprise organizations. The company relies on three main groups to drive its outbound business: outbound marketing, sales development representatives, and field sales representatives. The company utilizes its outbound motion in conjunction with its inbound efforts to help accelerate the adoption of the company’s products, and the increased usage of its products within existing customers.
Partner Ecosystem: The company’s growing partner ecosystem enriches its offerings, scales its geographic coverage, and helps the company reach more EX and CX buyers, thus amplifying the company’s go-to-market investments. The company’s partner ecosystem consists of channel resellers, independent software vendors (ISV) and marketplace partners, including developers.
Once a business has purchased a subscription to one of the company’s products, it activates the company’s customer success programs that are aligned with the size and scale of each customer and are designed to ensure businesses are getting the most out of their subscription. The company provides digital onboarding directly or with partners to all customers. The company conducts health checks and business reviews, monitor customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores, and identify gaps to proactively address any concerns. The company’s customer success team is also responsible for customer renewals and for identifying expansion opportunities.
Products and Capabilities
Freshworks provides solutions that serve the needs of users in the CX and EX categories. These product offerings enable organizations to acquire, engage, and better serve their customers and employees.
For customer-facing teams, the company offers its AI-powered, CX family of products, including Freshdesk, Freshdesk Omni, Freshchat, Freshsales, and Freshmarketer. These products allow businesses to deliver effortless, self-service resolutions for their customers, a unified workspace for their agents, and performance insights for their leaders.
For IT and employee-facing teams, the company offers its AI-powered EX family of products, including Freshservice, Freshservice for Buisness Teams and Device42. Freshservice is its unified IT Management platform that combines IT Service management, IT Operations management, IT Asset Management and Employee Service Management on the same platform. Freshservice provides both the intelligence and automation organizations need to give employees the consumer like experience they now expect. With Freshservice for Business Teams, this platform also extends to non-IT departments like HR, Facilities and Legal.
All of the company's products leverage the Freshworks platform, which provides shared services that enable the company to rapidly innovate and release new capabilities. This includes Freddy AI, the company’s generative AI-powered suite of services, that enable organizations to more efficiently deliver customer and employee delight at scale. Organizations can also use the Freshworks developer platform and marketplace to extend and integrate Freshworks into their existing systems and advanced analytics to gain insights that help them run their business more efficiently.
Freshworks Solutions
Customer Experience Offerings
Freshworks has a unified platform for CX that includes products for Customer Service (CS) and Sales & Marketing automation (S&M).
Customer Service Product Offerings
Freshworks offers various products to address specific use cases across CS. These are:
Freshdesk Omni. Freshdesk Omni, formerly known as Customer Service Suite, brings everything businesses need to deliver seamless omnichannel support into a single solution that is quick to deploy, easy to use, and simple to manage. Plus, powerful AI capabilities help deliver exceptional support at scale by quickly solving customer issues, supercharging agent productivity, and providing proactive insights to managers and leaders. Businesses can transform the customer experience and resolve issues faster than ever before with Freshdesk Omni.
Freshdesk. Freshdesk is a comprehensive ticketing and case management solution that lets businesses resolve customer issues fast. Businesses can delight customers with easy email experiences and self-service across dedicated portals and their websites, all powered by a robust knowledge base. They can intelligently route tickets and collaborate seamlessly with team members to ensure quick and accurate resolutions. Freshworks' powerful AI means customer service agents get more done, and customers get exceptional service every time.
Freshchat. Freshchat provides agents with a modern conversational experience to proactively engage customers across digital messaging channels, such as WhatsApp, Google Business Messages, SMS, and more. Freshchat enables automated and personalized self-service for fast resolutions. When an issue requires agent support, a customer is seamlessly transferred to an agent. Agents are equipped with a full customer context and AI productivity tools to deliver fast resolutions. Leaders gain unified dashboards and reports to drive team performance. Freshchat is commonly included as part of the complete CS, Sales & Marketing, and ITSM offerings.
Freddy AI Agent for CS provides always-on, conversational assistance to customers, enabling customers to resolve issues quickly and efficiently across channels. Available in multiple languages, Freddy AI Agent is designed to be easy to deploy and manage. Businesses can simply connect their knowledge sources (documents, PDFs, public URLs) to get started, with no requirement for complex decision tree flows or heavy setup efforts. Freddy AI Copilot acts as a coach and collaborator that helps boost agent productivity and performance by summarizing tickets and conversations, suggesting responses, and providing quality coaching and feedback after every interaction.
Sales and Marketing Automation Offerings
Freshworks also offers a sales automation product Freshsales and a marketing automation product called Freshmarketer.
Freshsales. Freshsales is an easy-to-use, AI-powered sales CRM that helps businesses enhance productivity and drive revenue growth. The CRM transforms the sales experience with 360-degree customer context, equipping sales teams with real-time relevant information. It offers personalized engagement, accurate forecasting, and intelligent workflows to improve sales performance and deliver exceptional customer experiences. With powerful AI capabilities, Freshsales helps sales teams prioritize high-intent leads, scale personalized outreach, and identify critical deals to take the next best action to accelerate sales cycles. Freshsales is a trusted choice for businesses of varying sizes, offering the flexibility and scalability necessary to adapt to dynamic market conditions and excel in competitive landscape.
Freshmarketer. Freshmarketer is an easy-to-use marketing automation platform designed to help businesses attract, nurture, convert, and retain customers. It empowers businesses to connect with customers across their preferred channels—email, SMS, WhatsApp, or social media—driving higher engagement. With AI-driven campaign creation, advanced segmentation and personalization, real-time automated journeys, and in-depth analytics and reporting, Freshmarketer enables businesses to maximize their marketing ROI. Additionally, it offers conversational marketing tools like live chat and chatbots, along with features for landing page customization and conversion rate optimization, making it a complete solution for all marketing requirements.
IT and Employee Service Management (ITSM) Product Offerings
Freshservice is a unified, AI-powered solution with essential IT and employee service management capabilities that empower the company’s customers to provide reliable and consistent services company-wide.
Freshservice. Freshservice delivers the capabilities IT leaders need to manage the entire IT estate, including IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and IT Asset Management (ITAM), on the same platform, enabling collaboration across teams without complexity. Freshservice streamlines IT service delivery, providing a unified approach to incident, request, knowledge, change, and problem management. The company’s services-aware IT operations management provides integrated alert management by processing large amounts of machine-based system monitoring data to put the focus on critical areas and drive fast resolution. It also helps the company’s customers manage major incidents, get on-call management and track service health. Asset management helps gain infrastructure visibility and optimize the assets used to provide services on-premises, hybrid, and cloud. Freshservice also offers powerful dashboards and analytics functionality to improve service delivery.
Freshservice harnesses the power of AI to transform the way employees, service agents, and business leaders work by replacing forms, lists, and queries with conversational, collaborative, and omnichannel experiences. Freshservice can leverage virtual agents called Freddy AI Agents designed to provide always-on, trustworthy and conversational service to help employees resolve issues, make requests, and answer questions without contacting the service desk. Freshservice also utilizes Freddy AI Copilot and is designed to increase agent productivity by automating routine work like summarizing tickets, generating responses, and creating consistent tone and clarity of responses.
Freshservice for Business Teams. Freshservice for Business Teams provides a unified employee service experience while ensuring the secure separation of departmental data. Freshservice for Business Teams enables non-IT departments like HR, Finance, Facilities, and Legal to benefit from service management and workflow automation.
Device42. D42 Parent, Inc., a Freshworks company, provides advanced IT discovery and dependency mapping. Device42 is designed to continuously discover, map, and provide complete visibility across on-premises and cloud IT environments. With its built-in AI capabilities and reporting, Device42 helps customers get answers fast and insights that help them solve problems faster, maintain compliance requirements, reduce risk, and ensure business continuity.
Freshworks Platform
The Freshworks platform is the AI-powered, enterprise-grade foundation for all Freshworks products. Key components of the company’s platform include an AI engine, a Developer platform, the Freshworks Marketplace, analytics service and unified customer experience services.
Freddy AI is Freshworks' native AI engine that brings the power of generative AI to all Freshworks products. Customers are able to gain personalized support via Freddy AI Agent, contextual user assistance via Freddy Copilot, and actionable insights via Freddy Insights.
The Developer platform allows businesses to extend the Freshworks product experience by enabling them to build apps with the company’s toolkits and comprehensive documentations, supported by a thriving community. Freddy Copilot for developers, the company’s latest generative AI capability, helps significantly accelerate the app development process.
The Marketplace, a curated collection of over 1,200 apps, offers plug-n-play extensibility to Freshworks products. These applications cover a wide range of categories including agent productivity, collaboration, data sync, data migration, workflow automation, etc. and can be accessed directly from the product user-interface.
The analytics service, an AI-powered no-code engine, enables users to analyze data, create data visualizations, and derive insights and actionable recommendations.
The unified customer experience services are a combination of shared capabilities that enable a unified experience natively inside the company’s products. These services include an Admin Center to centrally manage security and billing for its products, UCR to power a holistic view of the customer, Custom Objects to bring in the customers’ business critical data into the company’s products and Conversations to unify B2B and B2C channels.
Technology
Freshworks products are cloud-native SaaS systems that are based on modern, proven technologies—Ruby on Rails, Java, and MySQL. Leveraging these and other open-source technologies, the company’s systems are built to operate as independent ‘pods’ of compute, storage, and database infrastructure. The company’s products are hosted in AWS regions in the United States, EU, India, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates.
In addition to their ease of use and functionality, the key characteristics of Freshworks products are:
Scalability: As multi-tenant systems, the company’s products are engineered to scale with increased usage by businesses and an increasing number of customers. The company’s products are architected to be horizontally scalable across compute and database infrastructure. It leverages the open-source Kubernetes system for automated scaling of the company’s containerized applications. The company’s independent ‘pod’ architecture enables its products to be provisioned across geographically distributed data centers, for additional scalability and data localization.
Reliability: The company’s products are engineered with reliability as a key consideration from design through all phases of development and operation. The company runs its SaaS service with the built-in redundancy of independent ‘pods’ across multiple data centers within an AWS region, to provide continuity of service in the face of infrastructure disruptions in individual data centers. Every new version of the company’s software undergoes stringent functional, security, and regression testing, and is deployed through controlled processes to production. Following the infrastructure-as-code allows for repeatable and reliable infrastructure provisioning. The company’s products are monitored for performance and anomalies 24x7 by a Network Operations Center to provide for system availability and prevent abuse.
Security: The company is ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 certified. The company’s cybersecurity program is based on the concept of defense-in-depth and focuses on securing data at every layer. The company’s security posture is maintained by utilizing both enterprise technologies and customized open-source solutions designed to identify, detect, and prevent cybersecurity threats, as well as 24x7 monitoring for malicious activity. The company’s cybersecurity program encompasses product security, security architecture and engineering, cloud security, penetration testing, third-party risk management, and customer support. The company’s production network and systems are accessible only to authorized Freshworks personnel.
Efficiency: The company’s multi-tenant architecture delivers economies of scale, ensuring improved utilization of cloud infrastructure as businesses and customer usage grows. The company’s governance process is geared to identify and implement infrastructure and production architecture optimizations, and effectively utilize the capabilities of its technology and cloud vendors.
Sales and Marketing
The foundation of the company’s go-to-market strategy is a highly efficient inbound motion driven by PLG, as well as paid campaigns and search engine optimized (SEO) content marketing, affiliates and listings across peer review sites to drive organic traffic. Leads are ushered into a trial where they experience in-app triggers, lifecycle emails and functionality that prompts conversion to paying customers. The company layers in both an outbound sales and marketing motion, as well as a partner-led sales distribution strategy to increase success across the breadth of the company’s market opportunity. The company has continually increased investments in its outbound sales and marketing efforts globally. The company’s sales teams are organized by customer size, targeting SMBs with a highly efficient sales organization based in Chennai, in region sales teams focused on the company’s larger customers, and partner-selling teams supporting its partners in other geographies.
The company’s marketing efforts are primarily focused on generating high-quality leads and building its sales pipeline through a combination of growth marketing and brand acceleration programs across online and offline channels. The company’s digital and content marketing teams generate strong inbound demand through effective paid, social media, and SEO tactics that support website traffic growth and conversions. The company also markets its solutions through targeted online events and webinars, along with offline events across different regions, including trade shows, roadshows, and the company’s own flagship global user conference, Refresh. The company’s events are designed to promote favorable word of mouth, discovery, and demand generation. The company’s customers marketing team specifically focuses on accelerating engagement, growth, and advocacy from its growing base of customers, while also driving engagement with the company’s online community. Finally, the company’s press and analyst relations efforts help generate additional awareness and validation to accelerate and support the customer buying cycle.
Competition
For the company’s CX products, with regards to CS, the company primarily faces competition from CS suites, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and legacy vendors, such as Oracle and SAP, and with regards to customer relationship management, the company primarily faces competition from full-featured vendors, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics, legacy vendors, such as Oracle, SAP, and Sage. For the company’s EX products, the company primarily faces competition from traditional vendors, such as ServiceNow, BMC, Ivanti/Cherwell, and modern pure-play vendors, such as Atlassian.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had eighteen issued U.S. patents that expire between 2037 and 2043, and sixteen pending patent applications.
The company has registered trademark rights in ‘Freshworks’, the company’s logos and multiple product names in the United States and targeted foreign jurisdictions. The company also has registered domain names for websites that it uses in the company’s business, such as freshworks.com and similar variations.
Governmental Regulations
The company’s business is subject to extensive U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations, including laws and regulations involving privacy, data protection, security, intellectual property, competition, taxation, anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, and other similar laws.
In the United States, the company is subject to data security and privacy rules and regulations promulgated under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), the California Privacy Rights Act (together with the CCPA, collectively, the California Privacy Regulations), and other state and federal laws relating to privacy and data security. The California Privacy Regulations require covered businesses to provide new disclosures to California residents and to provide them new ways to opt-out of the sale of personal information and provide a private right of action and statutory damages for data breaches. Other jurisdictions in the United States are beginning to propose laws similar to the California Privacy Regulations.
History
Freshworks Inc. was founded in 2010. The company was incorporated in 2010.
