Key Sentence:
- He knew exactly what he was doing: “We want to grow big or go home,” he said in a 2019 interview with Forbes — seemingly predictable.
The 11-year-old named Freshworks Nasdaq IPO made his $13 billion Nasdaq stellar debut on Wednesday at the end of his first trading day. As India’s first software company (SAAS) to register with Nasdaq. Freshworks raised $1.03 billion and sold 28.5 million shares at $36 per share. The stock started trading at a 21% premium from the IPO and closed 32% higher today at $47.55.
The successful Freshworks Nasdaq IPO from the San Mateo-based company. Which has 52,000 customers worldwide, has earned the company’s co-founders and several hundred employees a high salary. Mathrubootham, 46, has an estimated net worth of $700 million.
Freshworks reported 2020 sales of $250 million and a net loss of $57 million.
From the first half of the year, it sold $169 million and a net loss of $10 million. Freshworks offers a $120 billion range of cloud-based business software products in the global cloud services market. As a result, it’s been on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, ranking the world’s top 100 private cloud companies for the fifth year in a row, rising from 95 in 2017 to 10 this year.
Before going public on Freshworks, Mathrubootham, known as “G” by friends and business associates. Raised $327 million from venture capital firms including Sequoia, Tiger, Accel, and CapitalG, a venture capital fund owned by Google CapitalG.
Mathrubootham’s entrepreneurial dream is long overdue. He grew up in Tiruchi in the southern Indian state from Tamil Nadu. Before earning his MBA from Madras University, he completed his engineering degree at the Academy of Arts, Science, Technology, and Research in Shanmuga, near his hometown.
Mathrubootham worked like a software engineer and even formed a computer education team before joining Zoho’s cloud services in 2001. He spent nearly a decade there developing many products and learning the nuances of business expansion.
When Mathrubootham realized untapped customer support opportunities. He left Zoho in 2010 to start his own business with five former colleagues. They rented a 700-square-foot office on the outskirts of Chennai for $100 a month.
Freshdesk started with just one product – an affordable help desk. The stakes are that the challenges of growing cloud adoption will strengthen the customer support industry, increasing the use of social media in customer service, and growth in mobile services.