Freshworks’ valuation jumps to USD 10 billion in stock market debut

Freshworks set its initial public offering (IPO) at USD 36 per share, bolstering its IPO share price for the second time in the last week and pulling its total valuation over USD 10 billion.

The company started trading under the stock symbol of ‘FRSH’ on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on September 22. It had initially planned to sell shares at USD 32-34 per share price range, after increasing the range from USD 28-32 per share.

Freshworks secured a total valuation of USD 1.03 billion from the offering with the current share price. The total offer amount of the company then increased to over USD 1.13 billion, including an over-allotment of around 2.85 million shares.

Freshworks had mentioned earlier that the net proceeds from this offering will be used for general corporate purposes, including operating expenses, working capital, and capital expenditures. It may also use some part of the net proceeds to obtain complementary businesses, services, products, or technologies.

This public offering has taken place when SaaS IPOs in the U.S. have achieved overwhelming success along with making many billionaires overnight. The listings of Zoom, Cloudflare, Snowflake, and Palantir which are already big private companies that are becoming even bigger public companies have stimulated great enthusiasm from private equity funds, venture capitalists, and hedge funds.

Shan Krishnasamy and Girish Mathrubootham founded the company as Freshdesk in 2010 and then rebranded it as Freshworks in 2017. Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Tiger Global are among its investors and the company was last valued at USD 3.5 billion on securing USD 150 million funding in November 2019.

Freshworks witnessed its revenue rise to USD 169 million for the first six months of 2021 as compared to USD 110 million in the same period of 2020. The net loss reduced to USD 9.8 million from USD 57 million a year ago. It has around 4,300 employees and 52,500 customers as of August 31.

J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and BofA Securities are the main book-running managers for the offering.

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https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/ipo/freshworks-to-raise-over-1-billion-through-ipo-valuation-jumps-to-over-10-billion-7493051.html