In early April, Arvind Parthiban, director of marketing at Freshworks , decided it was time to ‘gate-crash’ rival ServiceNow’s massive annual conference, Knowledge 18, in Las Vegas. The idea was to “take over Vegas” during the event.For this, Parthiban hired an agency in the US. A team of six Freshworks employees and about 40 more from the agency put the plan into action.From the moment conference participants stepped out of Vegas airport, they were bombarded with advertisements of Freshservice, the company’s IT services management product. Freshservice was everywhere – from airport taxi banners to mobile and walking billboards outside the venue. Freshworks even treated the participants to coffee and breakfast at the nearby Starbucks and picked up their dinner bills.The ‘takeover’ ensured that the almost 18,000 participants at the conference became familiar with the brand and many even came back to chat about what Freshservice was all about.This was the first multifaceted campaign effort by Freshworks, though it is a common practice in the US. A Freshworks official blog put this out after the event.“What we wanted to say with all of this was simple: you are paying too much for the product you are now using. You could be saving that money and using it for something else, something even more important, even something fun!”This was a bold move. In the newage enterprise software space, there is a fierce battle to gain customer loyalty. This also showed the growing competitive appetite of Freshworks, the country’s newest entrant to the fabled unicorn club of entities valued at over $1 billion.Girish Mathrubootham, the 43-year-old founder of Freshworks, is not your typical IIT/IIM/ Ivy league entrepreneur. He is a University of Madras MBA graduate who became vice president of product management at software products firm Zoho Corporation.The idea for Freshworks was sparked in early 2010, when he moved back to Chennai from the US and his LCD TV was delivered in damaged condition. Mathrubootham tried to get the shipping company’s attention to no avail. Finally, he vented his ire on an online platform with a long post. Suddenly, the company came back and settled the issue, because he had hit them where it mattered the most – their lead-generation platform. As a product person, he also realised that incumbents were not filling this gap. Thus was born the idea for a customer support software for the emerging social media age.Around this time, social media was becoming mainstream and customers were increasingly getting on to Twitter and Facebook to let companies know about their services.“Girish as a founder does not fit the prototypical founder in India,” said Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel Partners, the company’s first institutional investor, which put in $1 million in 2011. “When we interacted with him, it felt like all his conversation was experiential, rather than bookish. He picked up a category that was evergreen – product support.”Mathrubootham teamed up with Zoho colleague Shan Krishnasamy to launch Freshdesk in October 2010. (The company’s name changed to Freshworks in June 2017.) “Shan and Girish are two faces of the company. Shan is a very strong engineering person. Girish is a very strong product person. Whatever Girish thinks the customer needs, Shan thinks in terms of scale, architecture and quality,” said Kirani, whose first bet as an Accel VC was Freshworks and has seen both work at close quarters.Freshworks first targeted small and medium-size (SMB) customers, which account for about 64% of its revenue, with the remainder from larger customers, Mathrubootham told ET in an earlier interview.“A lot of sales was being done directly, self-serve on their website or through email or through very low touch. It is a great business model from a capital efficiency standpoint,” said Vispi Daver, senior vice president for sales and partnerships at Whatfix Inc., an enterprise cloud software company in which Mathrubootham is an investor.With the idea in hand, Mathrubootham had to build a team – not an easy task. While he reached out to friends from Zoho to begin with, he had to soon place his bets on young and fresh talent.“Once we moved beyond a few team members… I came up with this strategy... if you can’t get Sachin Tendulkar… you try to get Ajinkya Rahane or KL Rahul or Ambati Rayudu. Basically, we settled for younger talent, fresh out of college, who we could spot had potential,” said Mathrubootham.Kirani was witness to Mathrubootham’s prioritisation skills early on, even before he decided to write out a cheque. He recounted an early meeting in Mathrubootham’s office, which “had these different coloured chairs and different coloured tables, which means he has not put any money on the infrastructure, but he had bought high quality Macs for all his engineers. For him, that’s what matters,” said Kirani.Kirani also remembers how Mathrubootham was ready to shift his base from Chennai to Bengaluru in the early days because the UX person he wanted to hire preferred to work out of Bengaluru. While the person was eventually convinced to move to Chennai, for Kirani, these were signals that Mathrubootham knew what really mattered.Today, Freshworks has about 1,400 employees. Along the way, the company acquired nine companies, including Zarget, Konotor, JoeHukum, Chatimity, Pipemonk and 1CLICK, all of which resulted in new features or product lines. Zarget has become Freshmarketer, 1CLICK was used to bring in a co-browsing feature, Konotor helped in mobile customer engagement and JoeHukum was used to build the foundation for Freshchat.“With all the acquisitions we made, it changed the people profile of the company in a very dramatic way. We were able to get different kinds of leaders who were able to add a lot of value to the company by bringing colour to the variety of thinking,” said Mathrubootham.The company rebranded itself to Freshworks last year to signify a larger play – from a single product to multiple products.It was June 23, 2011. Freshdesk had won $40,000 at the Microsoft BizSpark Startup challenge. This achievement stood out for other reasons as well: the company was less than a year old and it had six customers across four continents – almost like a sign of things to come. Today, the company caters to more than 150,000 businesses and organisations including Honda, Bridgestone, Hugo Boss , Toshiba and Cisco across 127 countries.The company has just announced a $100 million funding round led by Sequoia and Accel Partners. The funds, most likely the last round to be raised privately, will be used to expand the company’s global footprint and continue investment in its integrated software-as-aservice platform. Its total funding now stands at about $250 million, at a valuation of about $1.5 billion.Between the Vegas ‘takeover’ and the recent fund raising, Freshworks crossed a milestone – with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue, helped by its flagship customer support product, Freshdesk, with contributions from its IT services management product, Freshservice, and customer relationship management product, Freshsales.While the times look good, for Mathrubootham it is simply the “beginning of a new journey.”The company has also come out with a fully-integrated cloud bundle called Freshworks 360, which brings together sales, marketing and support applications to provide users with a complete customer engagement experience.While Freshworks has been going on its own tangent, the surrounding software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecosystem is undergoing a metamorphosis, too.For industry veteran Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, a consolidation wave is imminent in the SaaS landscape, partly driven by integrated product suites such as Zoho One launched a year ago, which has apps catering to major business verticals like sales, marketing, accounting, customer support and back-end operations.Freshworks 360 is similar to Zoho One. Platform plays like this are what will move the needle, industry experts said.“One-off products won’t work. For most of the big product companies, it is multiple products and building an ecosystem around them,” said Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner at Ideaspring Capital. “If you look at it, some of the guys who have thrived… like Salesforce, they started with a product and have now built a superb ecosystem around them. Same with SAP and Oracle.”Freshworks recently hired Suresh Seshadri as its chief financial officer. Seshadri had helped AppDynamics prepare for its IPO before the company was acquired by Cisco in 2017.Mathrubootham, who had earlier spoken about the company’s plans to go public, said Seshadri will play a big role in planning financial strategy for Freshworks.“We will eventually need (Seshadri’s) expertise in IPO processes when we do go public,” Mathrubootham said in a recent interview with ET. Yet, there’s still a long way to go before a potential listing.“We want to see how we can expand vertically into larger clients and horizontally into multiple products,” he said.While adulation has been pouring in since the unicorn announcement, Mathrubootham said this “doesn’t change the way we look at ourselves in any way.”It may not for him, but it is a landmark moment in the Indian ecosystem as the Chennai-based company has proved that even a ‘boring’ SaaS play can become a unicorn.A global cloud-based software best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product which is used by sales and marketing divisions of various companies. Salesforce’s is listed on the NYSE with a market capitalisation of over $102 billion. It reported revenues of $8.4 billion in the last financial year.A cloud-based platform that helps automate and predict business processes and tasks across departments like IT, customer services, security operations and human resources. The company is listed on NYSE with a market capitalisation of over $30 billion. It reported revenues of $1.93 billion in the last financial year.One of Freshworks’ bigger competitors, the company was started in 2007. It offers a suite of CRM products designed for ticketing systems, customer interactions and analytics among other functions. Zendesk is also a NYSE listed company and expects to clock in revenue of $584 million in 2018, as per a recent investor report. It has a market cap of around $6 billion.The company offers cloud-based applications across sales & marketing, finance, IT and human resources functions. Launched a year ago, as a consolidated cloud product to rival other SaaS players offering specialised services, the company’s ‘Zoho One’ offers a suite with over 40 business applications.A help desk ticketing service which labels queries raised by customers of a particular business and tickets these queries and routes them to the right person for immediate responses and resolutions, among other functionsA customer relationship management tool for sales teams of companies. It provides an interface to manage leads, analyse sales data, track emails, direct calls etcAnother customer support platform that IT managers and admins of a company can use to tackle internal requests from employees and solve the organisation’s internal IT problemsOther products include Freshmarketer, Freshcaller, Freshteam and Freshchat