A Billion-Dollar Dream For Freshworks

Girish Mathrubootham is taking a cue from the rapid growth of Silicon Valley software startups to reach scale and velocity

- HARICHANDAN ARAKALI

For a fairly long time, Girish Mathrubootham resisted the move to America with a strong belief that world-class business software can be built from India. The founder and CEO of Freshworks had established a US presence fairly early, but product development at the company, which makes cloud software for customer engagement, still happens in India. And until mid-2019 Mathrubootham was running the show from Chennai, where most of the company’s staff is based.

A few years ago, when it hit $100 million in revenue, there was celebration within the company, as also in the nascent Indian software-as-a-service ecosystem. Mathrubootham and Freshworks were feted as big, genuine successes. However, “every time I travelled to the US, I’d find that there were so many companies at $100 million, and they’re really small,” says Mathrubootham speaking to Forbes India.

He also realised that companies like Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks and others had gone from $200 million or $300 million to a billion dollars in revenue in a matter of a few years. “That was fascinating to even think about. It can only be done in the Valley,” he says, referring to Silicon Valley. And that changed his mind.

He surprised investors—who in the early years of the startup would ask him if he wanted to move, only to be told ‘no, I want to build this from India’—and his staff by announcing he was moving. In fact, at an all-hands company meeting, ‘why are you moving to the US’ was the most asked question and the entrepreneur’s response was “I felt like an Indian athlete who had won the chance to compete in the Olympics, so should I go or not?”