Sealing a deal over chat

Cloud-based Freshdesk based in Chennai has shown that some million dollar agreements can be pulled off easily over on chats than during face-to-face conversation.

April 25, 2015 09:46 am | Updated 09:50 am IST

The deal was a sign of private equity investors’ appetite for another piece of the Chennai-based, cloud-based company Freshdesk.

The deal was a sign of private equity investors’ appetite for another piece of the Chennai-based, cloud-based company Freshdesk.

Yesterday, around noon, instant message application provider Hike Messenger sent a message to online customer support provider Freshdesk’s office in Chennai, saying it would be sending the latter a cake by the evening. It wasn’t anybody’s birthday or anniversary. The cake was to wish Girish Mathrubootham, Freshdesk’s founder and CEO, for successfully closing a funding deal of $50 million from Tiger Global, Accel Partners and Google Capital a few days back – a deal that was confirmed over a chat on Hike messenger!

The deal was a sign of private equity investors’ appetite for another piece of the Chennai-based, cloud-based company Freshdesk, just four years old. The same trio of investors put $31 million into the company a few months back. And it was the fifth time investors have poured money into the firm, which now has 415 employees and 40,000 customers. But the deal also showed how, in this age, an app could be used effectively to complete an important deal conversation, which in another age would have required a personal meeting.

It started with the $31-million investment a few months back. Post that, investors told Mathrubootham they were interested in investing in his company again. They wanted him to touch base with Lee Fixel of Tiger Global.

Fixel was in New York, while Mathrubootham was in Chennai. They decided to chat over Hike. “For us it really worked well because both of us know each other very well,” says Mathrubootham. Due to the different time zones, he had to do the chat at night. The deal was wrapped in two days.

“The nice thing with Hike is it has a lot of stickers and I can show my emotions while interacting.” Mathrubootham says there are certain things that can be communicated well in a chat compared to a face-to-face interaction. For example, “Lee told me, ‘you say you’re not a good negotiator, but you actually are.’ At that time I sent a sticker showing a surprise. I said yes I’m learning from the best (referring to Lee).”

But when two people don’t know each other, such deals aren’t that easy, cautions Mathrubootham. “If you’re doing a deal with an investor for the first time, it is better to do a face-to-face or at least a Skype video call, because you need to communicate without any misinterpretation of what you’re trying to say. You can send a sticker or smiley to someone who you don’t know.”

Freshdesk, Mathrubootham says, wasn’t in a hurry to raise funds. But “when I spoke to many people whom I respect they said when money is available take it and keep it and that’s what we did.”

He says, “We are burning very little money. Even if we don’t make any new revenue, we will have cash for several years.”

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