The financial year of 2018 turned out to be pretty eventful for Freshworks, a B2B SaaS company as it underwent rebranding and not only joined the league of unicorns but turned out to be the first ever unicorn company that instead of incurring losses, turned out to be profitable.
A unicorn company is one that has a valuation of $1 Billion or more and while no other unicorn company is anywhere close to deriving profits, Freshworks becomes the first one to do so. Freshworks as a company offers an array of software tools including CRM for sales, customer support software, and IT management among others to businesses. The company is currently working with over 1,50,000 organizations including Cisco, Toshiba, Honda, and Hugo Boss. Since the very inception of the company in 2010, it has acquired 8 companies that include Airwoot, Framebench, Konotor, and Frilp. It also took over Joe Hukum, a platform that helps businesses set up their own chatbots, last year and primarily is in competition with the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk, and skew of many others. Freshworks seem to have broken the stereotype of unicorn companies burning capital without generating profits after recording a 30 percent jump from generating a revenue of Rs. 199.62 crore in FY17 to Rs. 259.29 crore in FY18. More importantly, it recorded a profit of Rs. 20.91 crore in FY18 as compared to a loss of Rs. 6.33 crore in FY17.
With a 30 percent jump, the company has recorded 254.77 crores worth operational revenue in FY18 as compared to Rs. 171.9 crore in FY17. Overall expenditure of the company was Rs. 226.44 crore in FY18 where employee benefits expense accounted for the largest expenditure of Rs. 171.9 crore. In July 2018, the company raised a $100 million worth of investment co-led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners and stood with a value of $1.5 Billion in this series G round of funding. Around the same time, it also hired Suresh Seshadri, the Vice President of Finance & Treasury at AppDynamics as its Chief Financing Officer.
