Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside believes leveraging India’s vast engineering and software talent remains crucial for the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider to innovate and expand globally.

“A vast majority of our team is in India. We have over 3,800 employees here spread across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai. We built virtually all of our products—almost all of our code—here in India. That’s very unique,” Woodside says in an exclusive interaction with YourStory. 

Freshworks’ strategy of basing the bulk of its engineering and product work out of India allows the firm to benefit from the nation’s deep energy for software development. This, according to Woodside, gives the Nasdaq-listed company an edge over most international companies that only have a portion of their product development in India.

“India is super important for us,” Woodside notes. “We’ve really tapped into the talent that India has, the energy that India has, and the passion India has for software.”

Beyond being a development hub for Freshworks, India is also a crucial market in the CX (customer experience) segment to assist customers with vast user bases—PhonePe being a prominent example. “We’ve been able to scale to support customers with millions of interactions with their end customers,” he says. 

Freshworks is also bullish on nurturing the nation’s talent and providing pathways for professional growth. Woodside explains that each year, several learners, often from areas outside metropolitan Chennai, apply to join the company’s Freshworks STS Software Academy to equip underprivileged high school graduates with advanced tech skills. 

“Our STS Academy is special,” shares Woodside. “When I come to India, I make a point of meeting the students. Many of our employees have gone through this academy programme. We’re in our fourth class, and each year, we welcome a new cohort—this year, it’s about 90 people. Altogether, we’ve graduated close to 200 students so far.”

Over 70 graduates have already joined Freshworks in full-time positions, and others have secured roles at different tech companies in Chennai.

“It’s a really special programme because it transforms the futures of people who might otherwise struggle to make ends meet. They’re now earning global wages. Some have quickly moved into managerial roles, leading teams,” Woodside adds.

AI advantage

Freshworks’ growth has been fueled by its latest AI offerings, most notably Freddy AI, an easy-to-deploy autonomous service agent built to enhance CX and employee experience. 

Launched in February last year, the AI-driven tool has gained significant traction and has already attracted over 1,700 paying customers by the end of the third quarter, according to the CEO.

“A big driver of our growth this year has been AI. Our Freddy Copilot product, in particular, is resonating with our customers. That’s a pretty fast grant for a new product in the market—it just shows the built-in demand for AI. We’ve been able to scale to support customers with millions of interactions with their end customers,” Woodside says. 

Several traditional SaaS firms today are pivoting towards incorporating AI into their solutions to derive better ROI for their customers. Woodside explains that AI agents experience, on average, a 30% improvement in productivity. 

The primary draw of Freddy Copilot is its potential to deliver productivity gains for customer support agents.

“If a customer’s agent gets a complex question, in a traditional service centre, that agent would spend a lot of time researching the answer. With Freddy AI, as soon as the agent gets the question, there’s an answer suggested by the AI—it’s already done the research for them. That saves a ton of time and makes the agent more confident in answering,” he notes.

“AI is a huge tailwind and a huge driver of our business and that’s going to propel us towards the billion-dollar goal,” he says. 

Ex-Dunzo CEO Kabeer Biswas has joined Flipkart to work on the company’s quick commerce offering, Flipkart Minutes, a person familiar with the matter confirmed to YourStory.

Flipkart has not responded to the queries shared by YourStory at the time of publishing.

The Walmart-owned ecommerce major has been bullish on its expansion plans for Flipkart Minutes, focusing on adding new categories on the platform and cities to its dark store network. It has already launched quick medicine delivery in Bengaluru and Delhi, aiming to expand the feature to other top cities, the person quoted above confirmed.

Last week, Biswas handed in his resignation as the CEO of the failing hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo. Biswa is the latest co-founder to step away from the company after Mukund Jha, Dalvir Suri, and Ankur Agarwal left the company.

According to a report by Inc42, Dunzo’s major investor Reliance has written off its $200 million investment in the platform. Reliance, which holds a 25.8% stake in Dunzo from its investment in January 2022, is no longer involved in any discussions regarding additional funding or a distress sale.

Most of its investors, including Google and venture capital firm Lightbox, have also departed from the company’s board of directors.

Founded in 2014, the Bengaluru-based company last raised $75 million in a Series F funding round in April 2023 and has a post-money valuation of $744 million, as of April 14, 2023, according to data website Tracxn.

Hello,

What would a 90-hour workweek look like?

That’s on the minds of many after L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan said in a recently surfaced employee interaction he regretted not being able to make his employees work on Sundays. 

While L&T defended his remarks, saying “extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary efforts,” he was criticised online for tossing out any possibility of work-life balance. 

But what do long working hours do to your body? 

According to a meta-analysis of 48 research papers, working more than 50 hours a week increased the risk of stroke and coronary heart disease. Also, a 61-hour workweek increased the risk of hypertension. Health behaviours, for instance, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical inactivity, are also associated with long working hours.

Moving on, there’s a growing enthusiasm for the stock markets. 

Indian startup ecosystem saw a record number of companies listing on Dalal Street in 2024, Orios Venture Partners noted in its latest report. India also led the global IPO market with 327 IPOs, with 13 from the technology sector, including Swiggy’s $1.34 billion listing the largest global tech IPO of the year.

As many as 20 startups are expected to list on the bourses this year, according to reports. These include Zepto, boAt, Ather Energy, BlueStone, and Ecom Express.

It’s definitely going to be a memorable year.

Are you a startup with an MVP ready to scale? Register now for Dell Entrepreneur Challenge Season 2—a platform designed to accelerate your growth with funding, tech upgrades, and VC access!

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Inside Freshworks’ recent lay-offs
• Swiggy expands its offerings
• Expanding agri market reach with AI

Here’s your trivia for today: What was the largest forest fire in recorded history?

SaaS

Inside Freshworks’ recent lay-offs

Last year, Freshworks slashed 660 jobs as a changing competitive landscape demanded a relook in its strategy. SaaS companies globally are grappling with the rapid advancement of AI. Many firms, including Salesforce and Atlassian, had to let go of employees as they restructured their teams to build AI capabilities. 

“We did make some changes in the fall where we had to let a meaningful number of people go. Part of this is growing as a company. Some priorities you had a couple of years ago are no longer priorities, and the skills that some of your employees had are not necessarily the skills you need going forward,” Woodside said in an exclusive interaction with YourStory. 

Restrategising:

• He pointed out, “We’re not alone. Many tech companies have gone through the same thing. A lot of firms hired pretty rapidly during COVID-19, and have since scaled back.”
• Responding to the remarks which were earlier made by Zoho boss Sridhar Vembu—criticising companies prioritising shareholder buybacks over employee retention—Woodside argued that his firm is much more focused on building a motivated workforce.
• He stressed that Freshworks needs top talent, pointing to other major SaaS players such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, Atlassian, and HubSpot—collectively worth over $500 billion in market cap.

Funding Alert

Startup: Infinity Fincorp Solutions

Amount: $35M

Round: Fresh

Startup: Harsoria Healthcare

Amount: $20M

Round: Equity

Startup: Beyond Snack

Amount: $8.3M

Round: Series A

Foodtech

Swiggy expands its offerings

Food delivery and quick commerce giant Swiggy is launching a standalone app for Instamart as it doubles down on an app ecosystem strategy. This move is another addition to Swiggy’s growing fleet of standalone apps, which witnessed recent additions with Snacc, a food delivery app. 

On Thursday, Swiggy also launched Pyng, a professional services marketplace, and Swiggy Serves, an initiative to address hunger and minimise food waste across its value chain.

Major expansion:

• Swiggy had earlier doubled down on its strategy of a super app with major services like food delivery, Instamart, and Genies inside the same app, but there seems to be a shift in focus with the launch of two apps outside of its single-app ecosystem. 
• In its pilot phase, Pyng will enable professionals such as fitness coaches, yoga instructors, dance instructors, language learning, and education coaches to list their services on the platform. 
• For Swiggy Serves, the foodtech giant has partnered with the volunteer-driven organisation Robin Hood Army to redistribute surplus food from Swiggy’s restaurant partners to underserved communities.

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Startup

Expanding agri market reach with AI

Pune-based agritech startup Mulyam—co-founded by Mahesh and Yogesh Kedari, alongside Preetesh Dutt and Santosh Shitole—bridges the market accessibility gap for farmers and farmer-producer organisations.

According to Yogesh, Mulyam’s strategy eliminates at least three middlemen in the traditional agri value chain. The startup has introduced AI-powered quality and produce-handling systems to ensure farmers receive the best possible prices for their produce. 

Key takeaways:

• Mulyam, with a team of 44 members, is currently working with over 3,000 farmers across India and is targeting 10,000 farmers across eight states.
• So far, it has managed to sell 600 metric tonnes of citrus fruits, 4,000 metric tonnes of potatoes, and 18,000 metric tonnes of onions.
• Mulyam is developing a B2B marketplace for select commodities, enabling the sale of fresh produce in bulk to smaller markets, primarily in Tier II and Tier III cities. 

News & updates

• Job cuts: Global banks will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as AI encroaches on tasks currently carried out by human workers, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Chief information and technology officers surveyed for BI indicated that on average they expect a net 3% of their workforce to be cut.
• Raging fire: Insurers are bracing for losses of as much as $10 billion from wildfires in Los Angeles after blazes ravaged some of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in California, US, according to early estimates from analysts.
• Exhausted: AI companies have run out of data for training their models and have “exhausted” the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk said, suggesting that technology firms would have to turn to “synthetic” data or material created by AI models to build and fine-tune new systems.

What was the largest forest fire in recorded history?

Answer: The Chinchaga Fire started in British Columbia, Canada in 1950 and burned 3 million acres of boreal forest over five months.

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