Software-as-a-service customer relations management startup Freshworks Inc. today set its initial public offering range after having previously filed for an IPO in August.

Freshworks is seeking to raise as much as $912 million in its public offering on a valuation of about $9 billion. The company plans to sell 28.5 million shares at a price range of $28 to $32 per share, according to its latest U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Founded in 2010, Freshworks, initially known as Freshdesk, provides help desk software for customer support teams and is often noted as a competitor to Salesforce Inc. The company pitches itself as offering innovative customer management and engagement software for businesses of all sizes to make it easy to acquire, close and keep customers for life.

Freshworks has more than 50,000 customers in 120 countries. Notable customers include Bridgestone Corp., Delivery Hero SE, ITV plc, OfficeMax, Vice Media, TaylorMade Golf Co., Cisco Systems Inc., the U.K. National Services and Honda Motor Co. Ltd.

Coming into its IPO, Freshworks was valued at $3.5 billion as of its last round of funding of $150 million in November 2019. Investors include Accel, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global — all on the A-list of Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Freshworks also disclosed in its latest SEC filing that it had revenue of $169 million for the first six months of the year to June 30, up 53% from the same period the year before. Its loss narrowed by 83%, to $8.9 million.

Although not profitable, Freshworks enters its IPO with small losses and a lot of potential going forward. The way the company describes itself in the SEC filing is interesting.

“Freshworks is the company that wasn’t supposed to win,” Freshworks’ founder letter reads in the filing. “Whether we could differentiate ourselves in crowded markets, or compete with larger players, or build a global SaaS company from India, the doubts were always there.”

It went on in a refreshingly personal way: “And people were not shy about telling me! Over the years, I’ve heard it all, including there are 600 help desks in the market. How do you expect to win? You can’t find talent in Chennai; you can’t win unless you move to Bangalore. Microsoft just acquired Parature. They will put you out of business. Don’t enter the CRM market. You just can’t win. You really can’t build a global SaaS company from India. Yet, we kept our heads down and focused on executing, focused on our mission. We realized the profound meaning of what Steve Jobs once said, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish.'”

Tejas Bhandarkar, head of product at Freshworks, along with Bratin Saha, vice president and general manager of Amazon Web Services Inc., spoke to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile video studio, in December 2019 on how the company uses AWS (below).

“The big focus that we have always had is to deliver the right experiences that really impact end-users for those particular functional use cases around marketing, sales, support and customer success,” Bhandarkar said at the time.

Freshworks also deploys machine learning, with Bhandarkar noting that the company builds applications around functional use cases that require machine learning assistance.

“We have now thousands and thousands of these ML models that we have built geared to addressing specific pinpoints of that particular customer,” Bhandarkar said. “And then it’s not only just about building it; it’s also about maintaining it over time, making sure that it stays relevant and fresh and so on.”

Coming into its IPO, Freshworks has raised $484 million, according to data from Crunchbase.

Photo: Freshworks/Facebook