The SaaS company's IPO has inspired a generation of entrepreneurs in India, some of whom will likely build enduring global businesses. A peek into our cover story
Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO, FreshWorks
For Avinash Raghava, it must surely have been a high point, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Girish Mathrubootham for the bell-ringing ceremony, as Freshworks went public on the Nasdaq, on September 22. It was perhaps the biggest validation of his belief that there was something special about India’s software products companies — a belief he had acted on over the last decade, patiently playing a low-profile, high-impact role, helping to build the software-as-a-service community in the country.
Mathrubootham, the founder of Freshworks, had personally invited Raghava to join the Initial Public Offering (IPO) ceremony in New York. He credits Raghava for seeding the dream of India as a ‘product nation’ in his mind.
“People often ask if there will ever be a company like Microsoft or a Google out of India. Perhaps there will never be, but there will be companies like Freshworks,” Raghava tells Forbes India in an interview. With Freshworks’s IPO signalling the possibilities, “now many more companies will come up, and this is the dream coming true of the product nation,” he says.
That is the way many see the significance of Freshworks’s rise to a $300 million revenue company that is still growing at nearly 50 percent, going public on the Nasdaq. From this point on, the plot is for Freshworks—and Mathrubootham—to unravel, because, as he never tires of pointing out, if they keep their head down and execute, they can keep winning, and there are multiple tailwinds going for them.
Those include strong demand from the market, and plenty of headroom to grow, because two-thirds of the world’s IT is still not on the cloud. Freshworks offers highly relevant products, and a commitment to customer-centric innovation to keep the products easy to use for the smallest business and the largest corporation alike.