Item 1. Business
Item 1. BUSINESS
Overview
Our mission is to make it fast and easy for businesses to delight their customers and employees.
We provide businesses of all sizes with modern SaaS products that are designed with the user in mind. We started with Freshdesk, our customer experience (CX) product, and later expanded our offering to include Freshservice, our IT service management (ITSM) product. Next, we introduced Freshsales and Freshmarketer, our sales force and marketing automation solutions, and Freshchat, our messaging/chat product offering. Currently, more than 63,400 businesses use our software to delight their customers and employees.
Our powerful software delivers the modern functionality and capabilities businesses need, while being intuitive and easy to use, rapid to onboard, agile, and affordable for organizations of all sizes. We build intelligence and automation into our products wherever possible to accelerate user productivity and allow them to quickly meet the increasing demands of their customers and employees. By accelerating time to value, increasing productivity, and lowering costs, we provide businesses with a concrete return on their investment in Freshworks. With an increased ability to delight customers and employees, businesses also benefit from improved customer and employee retention, higher net promoter scores (NPS), and better business outcomes.
Businesses from more than 170 countries around the world use Freshworks products to delight their customers and employees every day. As of December 31, 2022, over 50% of our annual recurring revenue (ARR) was from customers with more than 250 employees. We provide products across multiple markets in order to address the needs of businesses of all sizes that need to digitally transform to delight their customers and employees.
Our business has grown rapidly in recent periods as our customer base and operations have scaled. Our total revenue was $498.0 million, $371.0 million and $249.7 million in the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021 and 2020, respectively, representing year-over-year growth rates of 34% and 49%, respectively.
Our Business Model
Product-led growth (PLG) is the core foundation of Freshworks and has helped us serve organizations of all sizes. The simplicity and powerful functionality underpinning our Freshworks solutions acts as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion by driving trials of our products that we supplement with our inbound and outbound sales motions. Our pricing is transparent, affordable, and easy to understand, reducing the length of sales cycles and increasing the efficiency of marketing and sales. This enables us to disrupt the traditional top-down sales motion, letting users, not executives, designate Freshworks as their software of choice.
Our go-to-market approach allows us to respond to how businesses want to buy our products. This flexible approach capitalizes on the strong user-driven adoption and user love for our products with a dedicated focus on driving successful adoption and expansion within organizations and divisions of large organizations. We offer our products under both free and paid subscription plans, further reducing friction to adoption and accelerating our go-to-market motion.
We focus our go-to-market motion on businesses based on their size:
• Small- and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMB) (organizations with 250 or fewer employees): We service our 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): We service our mid-market customers through inbound, outbound and partner demand generation.
• Enterprise (organizations with 5,001 or more employees): We service our enterprise customers through inbound, outbound and partner demand generation. We focus on serving divisions or departments within enterprises.
We have three go-to-market motions to attract customers:
• Inbound motion : Our inbound motion is the primary way we sell to organizations, regardless of the organization’s size or industry. We rely on efficient search marketing and word of mouth to encourage individual users or small teams within an organization to discover, try, and purchase our products. We drive potential customers to our website as the
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primary channel to learn about our solutions and we offer 21-day free trials of our products, giving potential customers flexibility to try before they buy.
• Outbound motion : This approach is focused on mid-market and enterprise organizations. We rely on three main groups to drive our outbound business: outbound marketing, sales development representatives, and field sales representatives. We utilize our outbound motion in conjunction with our inbound efforts to help accelerate the adoption of our products, and the increased usage of our products within existing customers.
• Partner ecosystem : Our growing partner ecosystem enriches our offerings, scales our geographic coverage, and helps us reach a broader audience than we would be able to reach on our own, thus amplifying our go-to-market investments. Our partner ecosystem consists of channel partners, independent software vendors (ISV) partners and marketplace partners, including developers.
Once a business has purchased a subscription to one of our products, we activate our 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. We provide digital onboarding directly or with partners to all customers. We conduct health checks and business reviews, monitor customer satisfaction and NPS, and identify gaps to proactively address any concerns. Our 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 ITSM categories, and we have also expanded our offering with Sales and Marketing automation products. These product offerings enable organizations to acquire, engage, and better serve their customers and employees.
For customer facing teams, we offer our CX family of products, including Freshchat, Freshdesk Support Desk, Freshdesk Omnichannel Suite, Freshdesk Contact Center, and Freshdesk Customer Success. These products allow businesses to delight their customers across touchpoints, streamline customer conversations, and automate repetitive tasks.
For employee facing teams, our ITSM product, Freshservice, provides both the intelligence and automation businesses need to give employees the “consumer” like experience they now expect. We also offer additional products, including management of HR and non-IT departments. These products and capabilities are relatively nascent, but we believe they provide evidence of our continued focus on innovation and will be growth opportunities for Freshworks in the future.
For go-to-market teams, our Sales and Marketing products of Freshsales, Freshmarketer, and Freshsales Suite align users with a unified view of the customer journey to better acquire, engage, and close customers.
All of our products leverage our Freshworks Neo platform, which provides shared services that enable us to rapidly innovate and release new products. Businesses can use Neo—which provides a low-code development and a hassle-free deployment environment—to extend and integrate Freshworks into their existing solutions and perform advanced analytics to gain insights that help them run their businesses more efficiently.
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Freshworks Products Overview
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Product Offerings
Freshworks has a unified CRM platform that encompasses Conversational Support, Sales and Marketing.
Customer Experience (CX) Product Offerings
The main product line of our CX offerings is Freshdesk. It is a multi-product offering that includes all capabilities that customers expect in an "omni-channel" offering, including:
• Freshdesk Support Desk . Freshdesk Support Desk enables businesses to delight their customers at every service engagement touchpoint across traditional channels like email as well as modern channels like messaging and social media. Freshdesk Support Desk helps agents resolve complex issues through its powerful collaboration, tools, intelligent automation and provision of a unified view of the customer. Freshdesk also helps improve agent productivity through omniroute technology that balances agent workload intelligently across channels and agent availability, native field service management tools, and embedded collaboration within a customer record. Freshdesk Support Desk also has native technology that scales with the customer, including multilingual support capabilities and prescriptive analytics that support better insights and business decisions.
• Freshdesk Contact Center. Freshdesk Contact Center provides agents with a modern, cloud-based telephony system to connect with customers that supports complex call-flows, number and call management, IVR, and routing needs. Freshdesk Contact Center also provides a live dashboard and reports along with other agent productivity tools.
• Freshdesk Omnichannel Suite. Freshdesk Omnichannel Suite, an integrated suite of Freshdesk Support Desk, Freshchat, and Freshdesk Contact Center solutions, delivers a single, unified customer experience that moves with the customer across multiple support channels. Customer experience agents that use Freshdesk Omnichannel Suite are able to engage and track customers across digital and traditional channels to provide a superior customer experience to delight customers.
• Freshdesk Customer Success. Freshdesk Customer Success helps customer success managers at B2B subscription companies proactively manage their customers to increase customer retention and delight.
Messaging/Chat Product Offerings
• Freshchat. Freshchat provides agents with a modern conversational user interface to proactively engage with their customers across web, mobile, and social messaging applications. Our Freshchat bot technology allows businesses to provide self service to customers by automating commonly performed transactions and providing answers to frequently asked questions. Freshchat is also commonly included as part of the complete CRM and CX offerings noted above.
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Sales and Marketing Product Offerings
The products for our Sales and Marketing offering are Freshsales, which businesses use for sales force automation, and Freshmarketer, which businesses use for marketing automation. We also offer Freshsales Suite that includes the best of sales force and marketing automation with a unified customer record so businesses can better market and sell to each customer.
• Freshsales . Freshsales enables increased seller productivity by providing a multi-tiered approach to automating sales workflow and processes (including emails, telephony, appointments tasks and other information) all within a salesperson’s personalized activity dashboard. Freshsales also provides configure-price-quote functionality to quickly create quotes and AI-driven pipeline management to help salespeople predict deals performance and make smarter decisions to accelerate the sales cycle. Freshsales has the capability to provide out-of-the-box dashboards, real-time insights and the ability to create customer reports and metrics to measure efficiency.
• Freshmarketer . Freshmarketer allows businesses to proactively drive stronger lead generation and conversion through delivery of personalized campaigns with specific target audiences, use of lead generation bots to provide relevant and valuable content to potential customers, and better targeting of the right audiences to improve conversion opportunities. Freshmarketer also allows businesses to drive acquisition, nurturing, or retention initiatives by enabling them to build and automate multi-channel marketing journeys for different audience segments and to run conversion optimization processes for increased website performance.
• Freshsales Suite. Freshsales Suite, an integrated suite of Freshsales and Freshmarketer solutions, delivers a single unified sales and marketing solution that allows businesses to engage and track customers across their buying journey. Freshsales Suite includes a unified customer record for better engagement across each customer touchpoint.
IT Service Management (ITSM) Product Offerings
The main product of our ITSM offering is Freshservice, which helps IT organizations ensure the allocation and availability of technology throughout the company. Freshservice capabilities increase employee productivity and job satisfaction so that each employee can best contribute to desired business outcomes. Freshservice is an all-in-one, intuitive service management solution that integrates several traditionally disparate technologies, such as IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, Project & Portfolio Management, and Enterprise Service Management, into a single unified solution.
• Freshservice enables organizations to use its AI-powered service management capabilities to streamline IT service delivery, including unified incident management for holistic handling of incidents, knowledge management and change management. Freshservice supports employee productivity by enabling internal teams to onboard new employees into an organization quickly and with Freshservice's multi-channel approach for self-service, employees are able to interact with service desks across departments using their channel of choice. Freshservice also offers various efficiency capabilities such as asset management tools for the efficient utilization of assets, integrated project management for collaboration and efficiency across an organization, integrated alert management for timely resolution of service-impacting incidents, powerful dashboards and reporting functionality for greater insights to improve service delivery and virtual agent capabilities that gives employees the option to use self-service with chatbots to rapidly resolve employee service requests. Recent additions are service-aware IT Operations capabilities, that automates the processing of large amounts of machine-based system monitoring data and automating response and resolution to service disruptions.
• Freshservice for Business Teams is a new offering introduced in late 2022 that enables business teams outside of IT to benefit from service management and workflow automation. Non-IT departments such as HR, Finance, Facilities, and Legal, all grapple with a high volume of employee requests that can be easily managed through service management principles. Freshservice for Business Teams enables admins in each non-IT department to manage those requests through their own interface that is tailored for the needs of their individual department.
Additional Products
We also periodically experiment with offering free tools which, if they gain traction, will get integrated into one of our main products. For example, we introduced Freshping, which gives businesses the capabilities to monitor their website’s availability and get multichannel alerts if their website goes down, and Freshstatus, which allows businesses to create a custom branded website status page for internal or external viewing to communicate website uptime and availability. Most recently, we introduced Freshsurvey, a free tool built entirely on the Neo platform that makes it easy to measure NPS and other satisfaction metrics directly within Freshworks products.
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Our Platform—Freshworks Neo
Freshworks Neo enables customers to extend and integrate Freshworks solutions to mold their business processes today, and adapt to business changes in the future. In addition, it provides a set of common, shared services to rapidly innovate and release new products.
Key components of our Neo platform include a developer platform, enterprise services, foundational services, and the Freshworks Marketplace:
• Our developer platform enables businesses and developer partners to build, deploy and run feature-rich apps using product APIs, webhooks, and the Freshworks low code serverless application stack. The platform enables businesses to extend the Freshworks products to serve their specific needs and integrate easily into their existing applications and, in turn, daily workflows.
• Enterprise services include: unified customer record to improve context and insight, easy custom object creation, analytics to increase insight and collaboration capabilities to improve teamwork.
• Foundational services include: events notifications to synchronize and trigger across business systems, enterprise grade security, customer conversation channels to broadly engage with customers and Neo Admin Center for unified control of platform services.
• The marketplace includes private and public apps to integrate Freshworks products with their existing ecosystem. The ecosystem of apps and integrations easily extends, enhances, and customizes the capabilities of Freshworks products. Users of any Freshworks product can install from over 1,100 free and paid applications across a wide range of categories, including agent productivity, e-commerce, bots, Sales and Marketing, reporting and analytics.
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, our systems are built to operate as independent ‘pods’ of compute, storage, and database infrastructure. Our products are hosted in AWS regions in the United States, EU, India, and Australia.
In addition to their ease of use and functionality, the key characteristics of Freshworks products are:
• Scalability : As multi-tenant systems, our products are engineered to scale with increased usage by businesses and an increasing number of customers. Our products are architected to be horizontally scalable across compute and database infrastructure. We leverage the open source Kubernetes system for automated scaling of our containerized applications. Our independent ‘pod’ architecture enables our products to be provisioned across geographically distributed data centers, for additional scalability and data localization.
• Reliability : Our products are engineered with reliability as a key consideration from design through all phases of development and operation. We run our 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 our 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. Our products are monitored for performance and anomalies 24x7 by a Network Operations Center to provide for system availability and prevent abuse.
• Security : We are ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Our cybersecurity program is based on the concept of defense-in-depth and focuses on securing data at every layer. Our security posture is maintained by utilizing both enterprise best-of-breed technologies and customized open-source solutions to identify, detect, and prevent cybersecurity threats, as well as 24x7 monitoring for malicious activity. It encompasses product security, security architecture and engineering, cloud security, penetration testing, third-party risk management and customer support. Our production network and systems are accessible only to authorized Freshworks personnel.
• Efficiency : Our multi-tenant architecture delivers economies of scale, ensuring improved utilization of cloud infrastructure as businesses and customer usage grows. Our governance process is geared to identify and implement infrastructure and production architecture optimizations, and effectively utilize the capabilities of our technology and cloud vendors.
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Research and Development
Our engineering and product teams are customer-oriented and work alongside businesses to deliver high value, high-quality features and functionality across the numerous products we support, including customer-requested features that would be valuable across our customer base. We deliver these product features and capabilities through Freshwave, our adaptation of the agile software development methodology, balancing development velocity, roadmap predictability and product quality. Our internal ‘Idea-To-Product’ process for rapid solutioning of product requirements is a key enabler of innovation and collaborative development. The choice of expressive and powerful development frameworks and languages in our technology stack enables us to innovate at scale across multiple products.
We have a research and development presence in both the United States and India, which we believe is a strategic advantage for us, allowing us to efficiently invest more in increasing our product capabilities.
Sales and Marketing
The foundation of our 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 and listings across peer review sites to drive organic traffic. Leads are ushered into a trial where they experience in-app cues and functionality that prompts conversion to paying customers. We layer in both an outbound sales and marketing motion, as well as a partner-led sales distribution strategy to increase success across the breadth of our market opportunity. We have continually increased investments in our outbound sales and marketing efforts globally. Our sales teams are organized by customer size, targeting SMBs with a highly efficient, cost-effective sales organization based in Chennai, in region sales teams focused on our larger customers, and partner-selling teams supporting our partners in other geographies.
Our marketing efforts are primarily focused on generating high-quality leads and building our sales pipeline through a combination of growth marketing and brand acceleration programs across online and offline channels. Our digital and content marketing teams generate strong inbound demand through effective paid, social media, and SEO tactics that support website traffic growth and conversions. We also market our solutions through targeted online events and webinars, along with offline events across different regions, including trade shows, roadshows, and our own flagship global user conference, Refresh. Our events are designed to promote favorable word of mouth, discovery, and demand generation. Our customer marketing team specifically focuses on accelerating engagement, growth, and advocacy from our growing base of customers, while also driving engagement with our online community. Finally, our press and analyst relations efforts help generate additional awareness and validation to accelerate and support the customer buying cycle.
Competition
The markets in which we operate are highly competitive. A significant number of companies have developed or are developing products and services that currently, or in the future may, compete with some or all of our offerings. Many of these services do not offer complete solutions—often they provide a feature comparable to a component of our platform (e.g., only customer experience management, only IT service management, only Sales and Marketing). Within CX, we primarily face competition from CX suites, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Zoho, legacy vendors, such as Oracle and SAP, and pure-play vendors. Within ITSM, we primarily face competition from traditional vendors, such as ServiceNow, BMC, Ivanti/Cherwell, and modern pure-play vendors, such as Atlassian. Within Sales and Marketing, we primarily face competition from full-featured vendors, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics, legacy vendors, such as Oracle, SAP, and Sage, and pure-play vendors.
We believe we compete favorably based on the following competitive factors:
• designed for the user;
• lesser time to realize value of investment;
• unified experience;
• modern, end-to-end, and extensible platform;
• designed for businesses of all sizes;
• intelligent, automation-first and AI/ML-powered solutions;
• product-led go-to-market motion;
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• fast to go-live;
• easy and intuitive; and
• affordable pricing.
Governmental Regulations
Our business is and will continue to be 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. Many of these laws and regulations are still evolving and are likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future, and these laws and regulations can vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The costs of complying with these laws and regulations are high and likely to increase in the future. Further, the impact of these laws and regulations may disproportionately affect our business in comparison to our competitors that have greater resources.
In the United States, we are 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.
As a result of our international operations, we must comply with a multitude of data security and privacy laws that may vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Virtually every jurisdiction in which we operate has established or is in the process of establishing data security and privacy legal frameworks with which we or our customers must comply. Our failure to comply with the laws of each jurisdiction may subject us to significant penalties. For example, the data protection landscape in Europe, including with respect to cross-border data transfers, is currently unstable and other countries outside of Europe have enacted or are considering enacting cross-border data transfer restrictions and laws requiring local data residency.
For a discussion of the various risks we face from regulation and compliance matters, see the sections titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Business” and “Risk Factors—Risks Related to International Operations.”
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is an important component of our business. We rely on a combination of patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets as well as contractual provisions and restrictions to establish and protect our proprietary rights.
As of December 31, 2022, we had twelve issued U.S. patents that expire between 2037 and 2040, and nine pending patent applications. While we believe our patents and patent applications in the aggregate are important to our competitive position, no single patent or patent application is material to us as a whole. We intend to pursue additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost effective. We have registered trademark rights in “Freshworks,” our logos and multiple product names in the United States and targeted foreign jurisdictions. We also have registered domain names for websites that we use in our business, such as freshworks.com and similar variations.
In addition to the protection offered by our intellectual property rights, it is our practice to enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements (or similar agreements) with our employees, consultants and contractors involved in the development of intellectual property on our behalf. We also enter into confidentiality agreements with other third parties in order to limit access to, and disclosure and use of, our confidential information and proprietary information. Our intellectual property rights, however, may be challenged, invalidated, circumvented, infringed, or misappropriated and the laws of certain countries do not protect proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States. Moreover, our products incorporate software components licensed to the general public under open source software licenses. We obtain many components from software developed and released by contributors to independent open source components of our platform. Open source licenses grant licensees broad permissions to use, copy, modify, and redistribute our platform. As a result, open source development and licensing practices can limit the value of our software copyright assets. We intend to pursue additional intellectual property protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost effective.
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Our Culture and Employees
As of December 31, 2022, our human capital resources were comprised of approximately 5,400 employees in offices in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The majority of our workforce, approximately 4,580 employees, is based in India, where most of engineering, product design, sales and marketing, customer support, and general and administrative personnel are located. Our company headquarters are based in San Mateo, California, where most of our executives are located, and our other global offices are primarily focused on regional sales and marketing activities. We consider our relations with employees in each geography to be good, and we have not experienced any work stoppages.
Our culture is supported by the focus on the following four pillars of our Culture Code: Craftsmanship, Happy Work Environment, Agility with Accountability, and True Friend to the Customer. Together, these principles create the acronym CHAT, and guide our people and talent strategy. That is, at every employee touchpoint, from early recruitment all the way through the employee lifecycle, we focus on creating a culture that supports high-quality work, joy and pride in that work, speed to execution, and intense customer focus. The Freshworks Culture Code is not simply words on a page—rather it is both a statement of what we are today and what we aspire to be as we continue to grow.
Employee programs are also designed to reflect our Freshworks’ Culture Code. Freshworks aspires to be one of the most loved companies in the world. Creating “moments of wow” for employees is a key part of our talent strategy. We focus on supporting our employees not only within their own teams and careers, but also in employee wellness, including a clear focus on physical and mental health.
Full-spectrum diversity, equity, and inclusion are key priorities for us. The Freshworks Inclusion Board oversees diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Freshworks Women 360 is our employee resource group focused on career growth, mentorship, and professional development for women at Freshworks. Additionally, we have publicly joined Pledge for Equality, stating our commitment that 40% of the Freshworks global workforce will be women. Women represented approximately 35% of our global workforce as of December 31, 2022.
Employee and leadership development are critical pieces of our talent management strategy. We plan to continue investing in leadership capabilities and employee experiences as we believe that this is a key differentiator for our employer brand and for delivering exceptional business outcomes.
Available Information
Our website address is located at freshworks.com , and our investor relations website is located at ir.freshworks.com . We file electronically with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act. We make available on our investor relations website, free of charge, copies of these reports and other information as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. These filings with the SEC are also available on the SEC’s website located at www.sec.gov .
We announce material information to the public through a variety of means, including filings with the SEC, press release, public conference calls, our website (freshworks.com) and the investor relations section of our website (ir.freshworks.com). We use these channels to communicate with investors and the public about our company, our products and services and other matters. Therefore, we encourage investors, the media and others interested in our company to review the information we make public in these locations, as such information could be deemed to be material information.