Freshworks Inc’s billings jump 61% in Q2 on global expansion

CHENNAI: San Mateo, California-headquartered Freshworks Inc has said its billings grew 61% in the second quarter of the current Calendar over the year-ago period on the back of a global footprint expansion into Europe, South-East Asian regions, and in Japan.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies offer their products on a variety of subscription plans that include monthly payments for full-year plans, advance payments and so on. Billings reflect the money a SaaS company is bound to collect from its customers, eventually to be counted as revenue. Freshworks had said in July last year that its Annual Recurring Revenue had crossed $100 million.

Freshworks has been introducing its customer engagement and associated software products across regions: “In addition to the Q2 growth, Freshworks broadened its corporate footprint in Europe by opening offices in Paris, France, and Utrecht, Netherlands. On the heels of expanding its existing office in London, Freshworks hosted Refresh19 London, its first ever UK user conference, attracting over 400 attendees,” said a release.


Besides the European expansion, inroads have been made into Japan by partnering with OrangeOne Corp, a leading software company in the country. Freshworks opened offices in Hyderabad – third in India– and one in Melbourne, the second in the Australia-New Zealand region.

The company had added a Whatsapp provision to its in-app chat feature Freshchat to enable businesses to send updates on the Facebook-owned messaging platform to their customers. “Businesses can now send customers text, images, GIFs, attachments or canned responses via WhatsApp’s enormously popular messaging platform,”Freshworks said in a release. It had also launched Freshrelease, a product management tool to help IT teams fix bugs faster and cuts time-to-market for software launches.

Freshworks’ latest acquisition Natero is helping the company offer AI-ML leveraged data to its businesses to enable them to know more about their users. Its partner network engaged in ecosystem-building has helped create a marketplace that boasts over 700 applications. “Overall the business from the partner network from over 40 countries registered 100% YoY growth in first half of the year ending June 2019,” the release said.

Founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham, a Chennai entrepreneur who recently relocated to the US, had told ET in an interview in June that Freshworks had “achieved the scale and growth to go public.” Freshworks has raised funds totaling $250 million over nine years and made ten start-up acquisitions, all of them leveraged as software products for the Freshworks suite. The company is backed by Accel, CapitalG, Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital India.

Freshworks is set to host another user conference in Las Vegas, US, in early September.