Freshdesk raises $55mn Series F funding from Sequoia Capital India and Accel

Cloud-based customer engagement software provider Freshdesk, today announced a $55 million Series F funding. The round is led by new investor, Sequoia Capital India with the return of existing investor, Accel which has been backing Freshdesk since its seed investment. The current round of funding will be deployed in further development of new products and help in global expansion.

With this round, total funding raised by Freshdesk has crossed $150 million. Tiger Global Management and Google Capital are two other investors in the SaaS-based company. While Tiger Global participated in Series B, D and E funding, Google Capital joined in Series D and E funding rounds.

Only a couple of weeks ago, the company acquired Bengaluru-based Chatimity to scale chat infrastructure. This was Freshdesk's sixth acquisition in 14 months.

Since the last round of funding in April 2015, the company claims to double its customer base to over 80,000. Freshdesk has also opened a new office in Europe and added two new products since then. Though the company's customer base doubled since last round, company's spokesperson denied to share details of revenue growth during the same period.

Hotline.io is an in-app support and engagement platform for mobile-first businesses; and Freshsales is a CRM solution and sales system for high-velocity sales teams.

The latest round of funding will be used to accelerate the growth of these products and scaling Freshdesk and Freshservice, as well as the expansion of regional teams across the globe.

Global expansion

Earlier this year, Freshdesk opened its fifth global office in Berlin, Germany and named Arun Mani as Managing Director for Freshdesk Continental Europe. Other than its headquarters in San Bruno, Freshdesk has global offices in London, Sydney and Chennai and will focus on expanding the regional teams to better service its global customer base. Company spokesperson said,

Our office expansions are driven by our business. We have expanded our Chennai office multiple times, both in terms of office space as well as employee count. Though we have no new offices coming up in the near future, we will be scaling the teams at our existing locations.

Freshdesk has 800+ strong employee count, out of which around 40-50 are spread across their global offices with the majority of our employees in the Chennai office.

Freshdesk and acquisitions

Freshdesk has acquired half a dozen startups since it's first acquisition in August 2015. Here's the list of acquisitions by Freshdesk:

1. Airwoot - platform offering customer service solution on social media in April 2016
2. Framebench - an online collaboration platform in February 2016
3. Konotor - Chennai-based messaging app in December 2015
4. Frilp - an online platform that helps users discover a shop or service through their friends and people in October 2015
5. 1CLICK - video, voice and text chat platform with collaborative features screen sharing and conversation recording in August 2015.
6. Chatimity, a social chat platform, that developed artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbot technology in October 2016.

What do you think is the current valuation of Freshdesk after the current round of funding?