All right. I think that's my cue.
All right. Thank you, everyone, for coming. I'm delighted to have you with me, CEO and President of Freshworks, Dennis Woodside. Dennis, thank you for coming.
Thanks for having me.
Let's start with a little bit of introduction about Freshworks for investors in the audience who might not know about the story.
Sure. Freshworks was started in Chennai, India, in 2011 by Girish Mathrubootham. The initial product was Freshdesk, which is a customer support tool, initially focused on smaller businesses. The product that Girish built was a try-to-buy product, fast time to value, easy to use for a smaller organization. That product took off and was adopted really pretty immediately by companies globally. I think the first customers from Australia. That trend has continued today. Over time, Freshdesk was brought into more IT departments. Girish decided to build a separate product that was ITIL compliant for IT called Freshservice. Today, our business is, we're guiding to $820 million for the full year in revenue, cash flow 26%, cash flow margins. Today, we have two businesses, what we call employee experience, which is that Freshservice product for IT.
That's a $420 million business in ARR, grew 33% last quarter. We have customer experience products, which is Freshdesk and related products that are focused on customer support. That's about a $370 million business in ARR, and that's growing about 7% year- over- year. We serve customers around the world. About 45% of our revenue today is from North America, 40% from Europe. Our typical customer can range from a smaller business, especially on that CX side of the business, up to Fortune 500 companies that are using us on the Freshservice side. Freshservice tends to be, and EX tends to be a customer that is larger. Our target market there is a mid-market customer. Think of a company with 5,000 employees.
I was with New Balance last night, a Boston area customer of ours, in a sophisticated IT department, global operations, but needs a solution that's flexible, that's enterprise grade, that has AI baked in, that does things besides just ITSM, like IT asset management and operations management, that can work outside of IT. That's the sweet spot for that business and that product line. CX tends to be a smaller customer. Think of a company with several hundred employees, not thousand, that needs a customer support tool that's flexible, AI-enabled, and so forth. That's a quick overview of what we are.
Yeah, that's great. You came in as a, or you became the CEO, I guess, about a year ago, I think, right?
That's right.
You brought some new focus to kind of the company. Maybe talk about what was that, what strategy changes did you do as you came in as CEO, and what is working so far in one year, and where do you think there are some improvements to be made?
I think Freshworks went public in 2021. Like many kind of entrepreneurial businesses, there were a lot of different priorities within the organization. I think one of the things that we've been able to do over the last year is to bring a much clearer focus to what really matters and where do we need to put most of our firepower. The three priorities I've set have an order. The first priority is EX. That EX business is a fantastic business. It's our largest business. It's our fastest growing business. The economics are fantastic. The competitive landscape for us is really good. That mid-market is wide open for us. The solutions that are there, if you're an IT manager in one of these organizations, you can choose from very old technology like BMC, Ivanti, Cherwell, even ServiceNow is a 20-year-old product, or you can choose us.
There is not a lot of other solutions out there that really can compete, and we like that. That is the number one priority. The second priority that I said is around AI and ensuring that we have innovative products that we can monetize. We launched Copilot, which was our first real effort at monetizing AI about a year ago, a year and a quarter ago. We have 2,700 paying customers for that product. It is a $29 a seat add-on on top of your license, whether it is CX or EX. Customers are seeing 30% productivity improvement from that. They are seeing the labor cost savings, and they are very willing to pay the $29 a seat. That focus on AI has been super important for us. We also have an AI Agent product, which is primarily for CX to deflect tickets in the first place.
We have a third product that's in beta that's going to go into GA, which is for managers called AI Insights. That's a conversational interface for a manager to understand what's going on in their service environment. It will launch with EX in particular. AI was the second priority. Getting that CX business initially to stabilize in terms of growth and ultimately to re-accelerate for growth has been about focusing the product effort, focusing the go-to-market effort, really getting efficient and good at that inbound motion, more efficient and better than we have been. What you're going to see over the course of the next year is getting the product to the point where it's more competitive in the mid-market.
Because then we can do a better job of selling that into the large EX customer base that we've built up in that mid-market. Customers want, once they see the value of Freshservice, they are very open to bringing us into their customer support environment as well. Getting that focus has been really important. The other thing I've spent a lot of time is building the capability to go upmarket. That can be partnerships. Like we announced a partnership with Unisys, which is our first real GSI partnership that's going to help us move into larger organizations. It's the sales teams themselves building the capability there to win larger and larger deals.
It's the cadence of managing that kind of a business, which is a little bit lumpier than what we've had in the past, and driving that kind of competitiveness when we get into situations where we're going head-to-head with much larger competitors. That's what I've been focused on, get the three areas of focus, get that strategy landed, get the team executing against it, help us move upmarket, and really deliver against it.
Yeah. Let's talk about each one of them one by one, right? So EX is kind of your big opportunity, $420 million, you said, 33% growth. To maintain, let's say, 25%-30% kind of a growth, you will have to add $100-$150 million a year, right? It's a large scale.
It becomes a big number.
Yeah. So talk about that opportunity. What is the confidence in that opportunity around all of them, right? ITSM, ESM, and then ITAM now with Device42.
The first is the way to break down that growth. Think about a third has to come from net new wins, and two-thirds has to come from expansion of that existing base. On the net new win side, the market for automating the IT department is huge. Every company in the world needs a solution like what we have. Every company in the world has to get more productivity out of their IT team. They have to manage outages and respond to issues and resolve problems. They need an asset management solution. Often, they're looking for a solution that they can also use outside the IT department. The TAM is huge. It's every company in the world.
The market historically has been served with one competitor, whether that's BMC, Ivanti, Cherwell, and ServiceNow, that has done the whole stack, from the kind of high end of SMB all the way up. The reality is the needs of the mid-market in particular are very different than the needs of an enterprise, a large enterprise like a Home Depot. A smaller organization doesn't have as many resources to put on a single piece of software and can't afford to have dedicated resources just to babysit the software. We have one customer who had three people full-time babysitting the competitive solution that they had before they moved to us. They're looking for a leaner piece of software they can manage themselves, and they're looking for lower overall costs. That market is huge. We have plenty of app ads.
Increasingly, as the product continues to mature, we are involved in bigger and bigger opportunities in that mid-market space. That is the new business side. That is a field motion. It is partner-assisted, and that is scaling really well, and we have a lot of confidence in that. The expansion motion, as we have built the product out, we have more and more to expand with. We can go into an existing customer and add Device42. That is typically a big add on a total bill for a customer. We can add in AI. That can be a meaningful component as well to move to Freddy Copilot. We can add in ESM, so departments outside of IT. In fact, that is one of our faster-growing product lines, and about a fifth of all new seats are actually outside of IT. They are in ESM today.
We're building deeper capabilities in four departments outside of IT, like the HR department, where we can do things like create much more advanced onboarding and offboarding routines within the product itself. That's the kind of capability we're investing in, and that's going to be coming in the next couple of months. There are plenty of expansion levers on that side of the business to grow. That's how I think of it. Yes, it's a big number. About a third has to come from new business. About two-thirds has to come from expansion. We have a lot of certainty on the new business front, and we have a lot of levers on the expansion side.
On the expansion side, help us understand, the Device42 is extremely new, right? What is the penetration today? Is it just getting started? ESM, how many customers, ITSM customers actually using ESM? Just help us understand where are we.
Sure. Device42, just to step back, we acquired a company called Device42 that does asset management. They're actually Boston-ish based. It was last June. It has been really two quarters of selling that product. The first quarter, we were aligning our pipeline and go-to-market and so forth. The hypothesis for the deal was that we were losing customers or losing new customers because our asset management capability was not deep enough. It was to win new business, win bigger deals. The other vector was we were going to sell that into our existing base. Both of those have proven to pan out. If you look at our top deals in Q1, two of our top five Freshservice deals involved Device42 for new business.
If we look at our existing customers, we have large customers like Amex Business Travel adopting Device42 as an upsell. We are still only two quarters into selling it, but it is a staple for any large deal. We are going to raise it in any large deal. Many customers who are migrating from a different solution, if you are migrating from BMC, if you are migrating from ServiceNow, you have a CMDB, you have an asset management capability in those products. You expect that when you come over to us. Many of those customers are evaluating asset management right alongside our ITSM capabilities. For our existing base, they might be using another solution. Many of them are manual, are using Excel sheets to try to track assets, or they do not have a good solution at all.
There's a lot of reasons that they should have a better automated solution, and that's an opportunity for us to sell that in. That's Device42 and asset management. You also asked about ESM. Our ESM capability today, we're really just getting started in a sense, and that Freshservice for business teams is a workspace that's segregated from the IT workspace. If I am the people team leader, typically it's like a people operations lead, I don't want the IT department to see everything that's in my service environment. I want to be able to control it myself. That's what we built. What we're doing now is building much richer functionality that's specific for teams like HR to offer them a solution that's AI-enabled that allows them to provide excellent service to their employees internally.
A common use case is this onboarding, offboarding use case, where we have customers with thousands of security agents, and the turnover is 30% a year. They have to onboard and offboard thousands of agents each year. They have to be provisioned on different pieces of software, hardware, all that stuff. That in many organizations is highly manual. If we can provide a solution that automates that, makes it easy, makes it auditable, there is a market for that. That is what we are building into ESM. It is a meaningful portion of our growth plan going forward.
Just quickly, is it possible to understand the step-up in ACV when you add a D42 or ESM?
D42 is priced on an asset basis. If you have an environment with a ton of software and hardware assets, it's a very meaningful portion of the bill. It can be a third to 40% of the total cost of the relationship to start with. It really depends on that asset count. That can vary widely depending on the company and the industry. We think ESM over time, I mean, if you look at some of our competitors, they're seeing the majority of their revenue come from outside the IT department. We think over time, we could see a meaningful portion of our revenue come from outside IT as well.
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the competitive landscape there. I'm listening closely to your transcripts for the, let's say, last few quarters. ServiceNow has been coming up more and more, right? Has that intensity changed in recent quarters? How does that win rate look like? Also talk about maybe Jira in that, Atlassian Jira in that conversation.
Yeah. I mean, I think if you were to talk to partners or Forrester or Gartner, they would say that the market has changed pretty meaningfully in the last couple of years and that our product has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. Typically, if you're a mid-sized organization, maybe you signed a three-year deal three years ago, our product was not where it is today, nowhere near. You probably didn't think of us or consider us as an alternative at that point in time. Now, larger and larger organizations are realizing that they have a choice and that we have a cloud-first product that's modern in the way it's architected, that's easy to manage, easy to get up to speed, that integrates with their current environment, that ticks all the boxes around security that they need.
We have thousands of references that we did not have three years ago that they can go talk to. In some industries like education or professional services, manufacturing, I would say we are becoming more the standard for what to deploy when these opportunities come up for renewal. I think the product has changed. The product has gotten much more mature. The customer base has changed. The customers are now here in that mid-market. Those customers are realizing that their needs are different than the needs of a Home Depot or a FedEx that have an IT department that probably is in the thousands, right? Our solution is better for them. That market has changed pretty dramatically.
The reason that you hear that kind of increasing drumbeat is we are just seeing more and more larger customers come off of these older solutions, ServiceNow, BMC, Ivanti, than what we saw two years ago, for sure.
What about Jira? Do you see them at all?
You know, Jira, if you look at Jira's customer base, I think that the last number I saw, they have $600 million in revenue and then a lot of customers. So the ARPA appears to be quite a bit lower than where we are. What we believe is that smaller teams in larger organizations are spinning up JSM instances for lightweight service needs that they might have. We do not see them as much at all in competitive situations the way we see the other players. We do see them. We see them in particular in companies that have large developer footprints, as you might expect, where there is a big Jira footprint already. The IT department is pretty different than the developer community. IT operates under a set of standards.
A lot of people in IT are not as technical, especially when you get into the service desk as a developer. The way the product works, the way you can train on the product matters a lot. Our product is very easy to train agents on. It's easy for the agents to operate in. That's different than JSM, which, first of all, was created through four or five different acquisitions. The product itself is a little bit clunkier. Jira, the look, the feel, the UI is really suited for a developer, and that flows through to JSM as well. In many cases where we do see them, one of the things that an IT department's looking for is usability, and we tend to win there.
Yeah. Understood. Let's move on to the CX business because that business has been doing about 7% cost concurrency for three quarters now. It seems like it has stabilized a bit. When you started talking about it, you said stabilization and then acceleration, right?
Yes.
What needs to happen for us to start to see that acceleration? Is it more on the product side? Is it more on kind of the enablement of the go-to-market sales side? Talk about that.
I think a couple of things. Number one is AI should over time be a net accelerant for that business, for sure. As I said earlier, we have three AI products. AI Agent is for deflecting that ticket that's coming in from the actual customer. Copilot for improving the agent's productivity and insights for the manager. AI Agent is really important on the customer support side, whether it's B2B, more so B2C. We do see early adoption of our AI Agent product. We have 1,600 customers using that now. We are building more capability into that product. We'll be releasing more capability in that product in the next month that allows AI Agent to do more on behalf of our customers, to take an action in a way that today it's capable of doing that, but you actually have to program it. It's a bit of work.
Think about a scenario where I want to return an item or change an order. That capability is coming, and that should allow us to monetize that CX motion or that CX product area, in particular for B2C companies, more than we have in the past. There are areas of the product that we know we want to invest in over time or partner for, where we can build richer functionality, things like voice, things like workforce optimization. Over time, what I would like to do is take that CX product on the similar path to what EX has gone through, where we find more of a fit in that mid-market because the mid-market for CX, some of the same dynamics are there as for EX. The players like Salesforce and even Zendesk are focused on much, much larger companies than that typical 5,000-person mid-market company.
As a result, the product's gotten very complex. It has gotten very expensive. We think there's an opportunity there to take the same approach that we've taken over in Freshservice on the CX side. We have some work to do on the product to mature it, to get it to the point where we can do that. If and when we do that, that will create a lot more opportunities for us to cross-sell in from the EX space into CX over time.
On the competitive landscape, you talked about Zendesk. Last quarter, I think you said your win rates are actually improving versus Zendesk.
They have, yes.
Maybe talk about that dynamic. Why is that happening?
I think some of the, like I said, I think some of the similar dynamics are at play in that mid-market. Think of one of the customers that we won against Zendesk. It is a large U.S. retailer, but they are not huge. They have about 10,000 employees in total. The Zendesk solution has gotten more complex. It has gotten more expensive over time. There is some question as to the level of innovation that is going on there, given the ownership, who owns it now and what their priorities are. That has created an opportunity for us to win in that space. We have more work to do for sure. Like in EX, it is very clear the product is ready right now.
We have work to do on the CX side, but there are early signs that that market's going to open up for us as well.
Yeah. Let's go to AI. That has been a debate on Freshworks for some time now. It almost seems like it's getting diluted a bit, but I guess we shall see that bare thesis of AI. You said you're seeing good uptake of AI Agent. Maybe first explain, because you had a self-service AI capability initially, then you launched AI Agent. How do those two kind of relate to each other?
Yeah. Like everybody, I think like many other solutions, we had a product that was more like NLP-enabled pre-Gen AI than we've had AI in the product since 2018. That's relying more on machine learning and NLP to provide functionality. That required the user or the administrator to program the actual bot itself. There was some natural language capability of the product, but at the end of the day, you had to program very much like you would program an IVR to solve a problem on behalf of an end customer. That changed with AI Agent, which is a generative natural language interface that a consumer can interact with through a chat window that is trained on anything that the customer wants to train it on: product manuals, FAQs, prior questions and answers. That was the shift that has occurred in the last year for us.
Most of our customers going forward are using the true Gen AI product for their L1 support needs. What we are now building in is the agentic capabilities to take actions on behalf of the customer. That is the evolution of that side of the product. We have 1,600 customers, as you mentioned or you alluded to, that are paying for sessions. That is how we monetize that product. As a consumer or a customer interacts with the chat interface, that is considered a session. We charge a per-session fee. It is similar to a resolution. The way that one of our customers would think of it is they know their cost per resolution is $5 or $10 based on the amortized cost of the human that is interacting with the end customer. They are willing to pay a fraction of that to resolve it via AI.
That is how that side of the industry is evolving as well. We are still very early, right? We have 73,000 customers. Only 1,600 are paying us for that product line. We have a long way to go there. The product has to get more mature. Also, customers are adopting at very different rates. I was at dinner last night, and a very advanced customer was like, "Look, our policies are such that we cannot use Gen AI. We cannot use ChatGPT internally. We are not allowed to use it, right?" That is because a lot of companies still are concerned about information and privacy and all that stuff. They are going to come around because the productivity gains are huge when you adopt. Companies are in very different stages of adoption, and our customer base is very broad.
We have small companies that have jumped in and are basically pushing the limits of the products that we have, whether that's Copilot or AI Agent or Insights now. Then we have other companies that are really kind of stepping back and waiting. In some cases, they're more regulated. In some cases, they're not. I think there's a long runway for all these companies eventually that are going to need AI to run their business. That's a huge opportunity for us over time.
Talk about what are you seeing as those 1,600 that are using AI Agents, they're seeing 50% deflection rates.
Higher. I mean, we're seeing on average, for those who have deployed on the IT side for internal employee usage, we're seeing 70%-80% deflection rate. Huge deflection. For the CX side, it's closer to 50%. Yeah, huge deflection rates due to AI and similar or higher customer satisfaction rates as well for the actual experience of interacting with the AI. It's a huge opportunity for our customers to drive greater efficiency from their business. They're looking at it as an opportunity to spend more on software and save a lot on labor. It's still super early. We think that we're going to be a beneficiary of that trend over time. We've proven we can monetize from both making the human agents more effective, that's Copilot, and then reducing the need for the human agents in the first place, which is AI Agent.
That transition then, you said saving on labor as well, right?
Yes.
For those people who are using AI Agents, have you seen them cut headcount in a way that could offset? How do you think of that, right?
Different companies are taking different approaches. We have one customer that's a very high-growth business. They're just not hiring more, right? Their expectation is they're not going to need to scale their headcount linearly with their revenue growth at all in that part of the business. Others are redeploying people to higher value opportunities or moving them in from support roles into more selling roles. There's a lot going on. It really just depends on the business and what their overall needs are.
How should investors think if you lose one seat, but you have more bot sessions? In aggregate, from an ACV standpoint for Freshworks, how should investors think of that, right? Is that you're actually getting more ACV, able to capture more value with the bots at this point or not?
Yeah. Over time, as the AI becomes more capable and allows the end customer to actually take actions, the value of that interaction, the value of the AI itself is going to go up. We will have to price that accordingly. What we have proven in the last year is that we can monetize it. That monetization, remember, our seat count is growing in aggregate. That monetization really is reflected in the overall top line of the company. As we see this shift over time where models that are entirely seat-based are going to become much different, right? They are going to become more interaction-based or resolution-based. That is what we are positioning our business to do over time as well. We have shown internally, at least, that we can drive that usage, we can drive that adoption, and that the monetization will follow.
You see that in the top line growth, right? 19% year over year last quarter.
Yeah. Let me pause and see if anybody has any questions. We have.
There's obviously super exciting traction on the EX side of the business. How do you think about prioritizing investment in EX versus CX? How do you sort of pull on each of the levers to understand you're investing the right amount each side of the business?
Yeah. That was one of the big changes that I made coming in. We had a number of other products that we had engineering behind. I reprioritized the business in order of EX, AI, then CX. The engineering allocation follows those three priorities. I shifted a substantial portion of engineering into EX. Then we bought Device42, which is an EX product with its own engineering team as well. EX by far is where we're putting more of the engineering resources, AI being second. The investment in AI benefits both product lines. Functionality like Copilot, although the specific application is a little bit different, the principles and a lot of the software is the same across the product lines. That has been the prioritization on the R&D side. Similar on the go-to-market side, our field teams primarily sell the EX product line.
They're focused on that mid-market account, more of an RFP type of a situation, whereas CX business is mostly inbound, mostly SMB. The CX business, that inbound motion is served entirely out of India. The advantage that we have, we have 4,300 employees roughly. That's actually down 1,000 from where we were two years ago. AI has played a part in that. We have, I think it's over 50 different applications of AI internally in our operating environment. India plays a big part of that too, where 3,000 of our 4,300 people are in India. Nearly all of our R&D expense, nearly all of our code is written in India. That creates huge leverage for us as well. The cost of an engineer compared to a Valley engineer, it's vastly different. That's allowed us to drive the cash flow margin up.
We're 26% for the full year is the guide. I see opportunities to continue to drive that up in years to come. The way I think of it is we've been very focused on driving profitable growth, getting that our gross margins are now approaching 86%. Our free cash margins are we're over 26% in this last quarter. That's been a big focus. We got to be able to drive real profitability out of the business. We got to put the people where the opportunity is, which is in that EX business.
Anyone else? Maybe touch on Mac real quickly, right? You haven't really seen anything else as of last year.
Yeah. Yeah. We were not directly impacted by the tariffs, but some of our customers are. Our customer base, though, it does not skew towards any specific industry. And it does not skew to exporters as an example or industries that are impacted by we do have some customers, absolutely, that have been impacted. But we have not seen that on a broad way affect sales cycles. We have not seen it. We did not see it in the numbers in Q1 at all. As I said on the call, as of April, we had not seen anything either. Neither in the SMB side nor in the mid-market and low-end of enterprise. So far, we have not seen it. Now, we think, we like to think that we are a net beneficiary of any kind of recessionary environment because our product on average is a third to half the total cost of our competing solutions.
As teams are looking for greater value in their software spend, we're a great place to look. We think over time that actually positions us well regardless of what happens in the macro.
Great. I want to ask you about the go-to-market changes. Ian Tickle kind of left in Q1.
At the beginning of April, yeah.
Beginning of April. With him now gone, how do you feel about the go-to-market leadership overall and any material changes you're doing on that field sales teams?
Abe left for personal reasons. We don't have a traditional CRO, right? He wasn't the CRO. He led the field team. I have a leader for field, and I have a leader who has both marketing and the inbound motion because marketing is so intertwined with that sales motion, and it's all in India. That's Mika Yamamoto. For field, we have very capable leaders around the world leading our field teams. We're focused on eight countries. My interim leader was the CRO at Domo and has done an amazing job jumping in as of April. I really don't see it as something that's going to affect our business.
Okay. Last question. You're 19% ARR exiting Q1.
Revenue.
I think ARR also was 19 in constant currency. I might be mistaken. But let's say high teens.
Yes. [crosstalk]
High teens. What's your kind of confidence in kind of maintaining, sustaining that? What has to go right for you to do that for multiple years?
I think on the couple of things. On the EX side, we have an amazing opportunity. The TAM is huge. It's really a matter of execution. Then continuing to find the next incremental area where we can solve a problem for our customer primarily, but not exclusively in the IT team, primarily, but not exclusively in that mid-market. Like a Device42, where we can build deeper capability to create more value for our customers and therefore drive more revenue for us. That side of the business, it's really about execution. We have to continue to innovate on AI and monetize AI. We have to get that CX business to a place where it has a better line of sight into these larger customers because those larger customers, on average, are going to expand at higher rates, retain at higher rates.
Those are the things that have to go right for us. Those three things.
Awesome. We're out of time. Thank you so much for the time.
Thank you. Thanks.