Girish Mathrubootham on Capital Allocation

The IPO in September 2021 raised roughly $1.03 billion on Nasdaq, with earlier funding rounds led by Accel, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital India and CapitalG — making it the first India-origin SaaS company to list on a US exchange and creating an ESOP windfall that reportedly turned over 500 employees into crorepatis.

In December 2024, prior to his full exit, he sold approximately $40 million of Freshworks stock in two tranches on 18 and 19 December, framing it as personal financial planning while publicly reaffirming his confidence in the firm's long-term trajectory — a calibrated promoter sale that avoided signalling distress.

Freshworks listed on 22 September 2021 at $36 per share, above the marketed $32–34 range, but by 5 September 2025 the stock had fallen to $13.01 — a sharp drawdown that contextualises the founder's exit and frames a SaaS valuation reset rather than a single-founder issue.

Together Fund, the VC firm he co-founded with Manav Garg of Eka Software, launched in 2021 with an $85 million corpus focused on early-stage software startups built in India or by Indian founders; a second fund of $150 million was announced in July 2023, with 31 investments made and a plan to back 19–20 AI startups from the second vehicle.

Mathrubootham frames his post-Freshworks mission as advancing India's ambition to become a 'product nation', explicitly positioning Together Fund and his mentorship of AI startups as a national-strategy lever rather than a personal investing sideline — a reframing that ties his next chapter to a broader Indian SaaS thesis.