Freshworks acquires Singapore based IT orchestration platform Flint

Customer engagement software company Freshworks has acquired Flint, an information technology (IT) orchestration and cloud management platform, for an undisclosed amount. 

Singapore headquartered Flint will be a part of Freshworks’ IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) suite, Freshservice.

Founded in 2016 by former BMC Software executives Ankur Gakkhar and Abhishek Pande, Flint brings advanced automation and cloud management capabilities to Freshworks, helping IT organisations manage a remote workforce. 

Post the acquisition, Gakkhar will be heading automation and cloud management product team at Freshworks while Pande will head the platform and technology integration efforts. 

The acquisition will help Freshworks use automation to provision IT resources, remedy business-critical incidents and automate workload using out-of-the-box connectors for popular service providers including Microsoft, VMware, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Slack, OneLogin and Okta. 

As part of Freshservice, Flint will also enable insight across infrastructure and apps, optimise cloud delivery and spend.

“Like many companies today, we felt the pressure of today’s remote environment as we went from 13 workplaces to 3,000 home offices in a matter of days,” Prakash Ramamurthy, CPO at Freshworks said in a statement. 

“With the addition of Flint’s intelligent automation, Freshworks takes the legwork out of tedious, repeatable tasks so IT teams can focus on high impact work while providing an exceptional employee experience,” he added.

Ramamurthy joined Freshworks in March from Oracle. 

This is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) unicorn’s second acquisition in 2020. In February, it acquired machine learning and artificial intelligence solution provider, AnsweriQ for an undisclosed amount. The company also bought AI-powered customer success solution Natero in May 2019.

Freshworks is backed by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Capital G, the private equity fund under Alphabet, among others.

The SaaS company was recently taken to court by Zoho, which alleged that Freshworks had accessed its confidential information to expand business and was involved in systemic poaching of its employees. 

Founders of Freshworks, Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, worked at Zoho before starting Freshworks. 

Freshworks was valued at $3.5 billion in its last round of funding announced in November 2019. The Indian unit of the company reported a profit of Rs 30.1 crore for the financial year closed March 31, 2019.