Putting the Freshworks IPO in Context (Part 1)

On Nov 13, 2009, I wrote an article in my Forbes column titled India’s Next Celebrities. It was a year after the financial crisis.

Never mind the recession. In India, entrepreneurial energy has continued to grow. It still exists only in small pockets. And the sophistication of the entrepreneurial ecosystem has a long way to go before it can resemble anything like Silicon Valley–or even Israel. In this evolution, the Indian media has an important role to play.

At the time, I was busy trying to turn Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, into a celebrity. Hardly anyone had heard of HIM until my 2007 profile.

I had not yet launched 1Mby1M.

Girish Mathrubootham, avid fan of celebrity Tamil film star Rajnikant, had not yet launched Freshdesk (now Freshworks). He was still working at Zoho, under Sridhar’s tutelage.

Both of those events happened in 2010.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2021: SecurelyShare, Bengaluru, India

SecurelyShare is a bootstrapped company with a deep focus on Data Security, Data Governance, and Data Privacy. It provides enterprises a dedicated platform for managing customer data privacy. Founded in 2017, the company has seven US patents and has already booked $1M in ARR.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2021: Fullcast, Seattle, WA

Despite the explosion of sales tech, attainment numbers for sales teams are at an abysmal 52%. This means organizations are making up for lack of planning alignment by hiring double the sales resources they need. To address this problem, Fullcast was founded in 2017 by Dharmesh Singh and Bala Balabaskaran as a platform for growing companies to streamline go-to-market planning and link the plan to execution-driven changes on the field.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2020: Integration Wizards, Bengaluru, India

Integration Wizards is a Bengaluru, India based company that offers Computer Vision and Enterprise Mobility based solutions. It helps enterprises determine actionable intelligence from images, videos, and data captured live.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2019: Cadenshae, Whangarei, New Zealand

Cadenshae is an activewear company that targets the niche market of pregnant women and nursing moms. They ensure that pregnant women and mothers around the world can work out and feed their babies in style and comfort, all the while feeling completely supported.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2019: PayKickstart, Carmel, IN

PayKickstart is a SaaS company that is reinventing the modern-day shopping cart and affiliate management. Its platform helps thousands of businesses and entrepreneurs sell their products and/or services online, maximize customer lifetime value, retain more of their customers, and automate subscription commerce. I

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2019: LeanDNA, Austin, TX

LeanDNA builds software used by factories across the globe. With a deep focus on making inventory analytics automated, actionable, and collaborative, LeanDNA enables manufacturers to optimize inventory, avoid shortages, and stay on-time with customers. The LeanDNA platform promotes visibility and standardization across systems, suppliers and sites, unlocking working capital for the business.

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2019: SourceScrub, San Francisco, CA

SourceScrub at its core is a business intelligence database surrounded by a platform that allows the user to find companies or investment opportunities that meet a given criteria. Its main value proposition is that its platform can help uncover founder-owned businesses that either aren’t very active in marketing or have yet to transact.