Freshdesk rebrands to Freshworks

Explains company's recruitment philosophy

Software as a Service (SaaS) based customer engagement company Freshdesk has rebranded the entity under the name Freshworks, in order to convey its multi-product strategy to the market and the customers.

The company has four products under its portfolio - the multichannel customer support helpdesk Freshdesk, a cloud-based service desk and IT Service Management solution Freshservice, a full-featured CRM solution Freshsales and the latest, a fully functional call centre on the cloud Freshcaller. Almost 75 per cent of its business comes from Freshdesk at present.

"We have been toying with the idea of having an umbrella brand for some time now, and decided to go ahead on our anniversary," said Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and Founder of Freshworks.

"We have started the company as a helpdesk for customer support, but over a period of time, we moved beyond customer service by offering IT Service Management and CRM products. But from a customer perspective, Freshdesk is a brand related to a particular product," he said.

The company would also be able to offer integrated offerings between its products to the customers. It would be looking at a brand building exercise in the next few months, on the new brand and new logo which the company unveiled now.

Almost 40 per cent of its business is from the US, while another 40 per cent is from Europe. He refused to reveal the revenue of the company at present. It has presence in 145 countries and offices in five countries.

While the company has been perceived to be a potential unicorn, Mathrubootham said that it is not focusing on becoming a Unicorn and is looking at growth of the business.

The six-year-old start up has raised around $149 million through six rounds of funding including from Accel Partners, Tiger Global, Google Capital and Sequoia Capital. It currently has over 1000 employees and over a lakh of customers including Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, Toshiba and Cisco. The company has grown around 70 per cent last year and is expected to grow at 70 per cent year over year during this year.

The company has acquired seven companies in the last two years, including 1Click, Frilp, Konotor, Framebench, Airwoot, Chatimity and Pipemonk. Commenting on the recruitment, he said that the company has over 1000 employees at present and adds around 30-50 people every month.

"In fact, I have been telling my HR to go a little slow on recruitment," said Mathrubootham.

"When you are growing through hyper growth, the toughest problem is not scaling revenue or building products or getting customers or getting funding. The toughest problem is scaling culture. When new people are coming, how do you make sure that all of them understand the Freshwork way of working, unlearn and relearn things? We have over the last one and a half years we have put in efforts, build tools to hear the voice of the people, to know what is in the mind of the employees," he explained.

"Everything from employee onboarding, to the recruitment experience, if you don't pay attention, things can really go off-wire. The reason why I want to scale down hiring is because - one is the quality of talent we are able to attract today is much higher than two to three years ago. We need to re-calibrate ourselves and to attract better talent. The second thing is you need to moderate the amount of people you take, too much food is also not good for health. 

Scaling culture is a problem worth solving," he added.