Freshdesk raises $55 mn from Sequoia, Accel Partners

Freshdesk Inc., which provides cloud-based customer engagement software, has raised $55 million (Rs 366 crore) in its Series F funding round led by Sequoia Capital India and existing investor Accel Partners.

The company will use the money for launching new products and global expansion, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

Girish Mathrubootham, founder and chief executive, Freshdesk, said Sequoia's "expertise and the excitement they bring will round out our already world-class team".

Mohit Bhatnagar, managing director at Sequoia Capital India, said Freshdesk has "a world-class product vision" and that Sequoia is leading this growth capital round to help scale the Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.

Freshdesk had, in April last year, raised $50 million in its Series E round of funding led by Tiger Global, with participation from Accel Partners and Google Capital.

In June 2014, it had raised $31 million in a Series D round of funding led by Tiger Global. Its early-stage investor Accel Partners also participated in that round, which also saw Google Capital coming in as a new investor.

Freshdesk was founded in 2010 by former Zoho employees Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. The SaaS-based startup provides customer support solutions. Its flagship product, Freshdesk, allows organisations to support customers through email, phone, websites, mobile apps, forums and social media. Its clients include 3M, Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss, University of Pennsylvania, Toshiba and Cisco.

Freshdesk has also made a series of acquisitions over the past 18 months. The latest acquisition was that of social chat platform ChatimitySoftware Pvt. Ltd in October.

Prior to that, the company purchased Faridabad-based Memeticlabs Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates social media listening and analytics platform Airwoot, in April, and acquired Pune-based visual collaboration platform Framebench in February.

Freshdesk also bought in-app customer support platform Konotor in December, social recommendation platform Frilp in October 2015 and video chat software 1Click.io in August last year.

Freshdesk competes with California-headquartered Zendesk Inc, which went public in 2014, and Salesforce.com, which offers customer service tools aimed at small and medium businesses as well as larger enterprises.