Girish Mathrubootham Built A $13 Billion Tech Company In Just Over A Decade

Business software company Freshworks recently was in the news for its blockbuster IPO at the New York Stock exchange, which raised the company $1 billion while also making 500 of its employees millionaires overnight.

Girish Mathrubootham

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The brainchild behind the company¡¯s success is Girish Mathrubootham -- the founder and CEO of Freshworks and his journey started with humble roots.

Hailing from Trichy

Rathnagirish Mathrubootham was born in March 1974, in a middle-class family. Son of a retired banker from the small town of Trichy, in Tamil Nadu, Girish started his schooling from Campion Anglo-Indian Higher Secondary School.

Coming from a broken family after his father divorced his mother when he was just 7 and remarried three years later, left a strong emotional scar that made it difficult for him to understand relationships.

He later went on to complete his graduation in B.E - Electricals and Electronics, from the Shanmugha Arts, Science Technology and Research Academy, in 1996, followed by a Masters In Business Administration from the University of Madras, specializing in marketing.

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Journey to his big break

Girish worked at a number of companies, including HCL Cisco, eForce, AdventNetInc, before he finally worked with the tech giant Zoho where he served as the Director and Vice President of Product Management.

While at Zoho, a comment on HackerNews, inspired him to start his own IT Helpdesk product in 2010 dubbed Freshdesk, based out of a 700 feet warehouse in Chennai, with his colleague Shan Krishnasamy.

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Freshdesk to Freshworks

Freshdesk revolutionised the way customers interacted with the companies, using social media. Freshdesk offers companies to address customer complaints across different channels, allowing them to have information such as account details, subscriptions or payment information in a quick-accessible manner.

It took eight years for the company¡¯s revenue to touch $100 million. Soon after in 2017, the company rebranded to Freshworks and set up its headquarters in California with global offices in India, Australia, the UK and Germany.

The company today is worth Rs 95,000 crore or $13 billion with over 50,000 customers across the globe, including major brands like Hugo Boss, Honda, Toshiba, Cisco and others.

Girish Mathrubootham

Next chapter for Freshworks

In a blog post, Mathrubootham shared the vision for the company¡¯s next chapter, ¡°I¡¯m very proud that Freshworks is a pioneer of Indian entrepreneurship and of our ability to blend the art of Indian design with the science of Silicon Valley scaling.¡±

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He added, ¡°We¡¯ve been on an incredible journey so far, working hard to build a company that is loved by employees and customers. It¡¯s day zero all over again for Freshworks as we start our public journey to build an iconic global software product company.¡°

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