Girish Mathrubootham

Girish Mathrubootham is best known as the founder of Freshworks (originally Freshdesk), which he started in a Chennai apartment in 2010 with roughly ₹35 lakh of personal savings. The idea famously came from a broken-TV customer-service experience and a Hacker News thread about helpdesk pricing. He built the company into a global cloud-software business backed by Accel, Sequoia, Tiger Global, and CapitalG, and took it public on Nasdaq (ticker: FRSH) in 2021 at a valuation near $10 billion — one of the first India-born SaaS companies to list in the US.

Before Freshworks, Mathrubootham spent nearly a decade at Zoho, joining as a pre-sales engineer in 2001 and rising to Vice President of Product Management by the time he left in 2010. Earlier he worked as a software engineer and briefly ran a computer-education outfit. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy (SASTRA) and an MBA in Marketing from the University of Madras — and is candid that he did not crack the IIT entrance exam.

He transitioned from Freshworks CEO to Executive Chairman in May 2024, and per an SEC filing stepped down from the Freshworks board/chairmanship effective December 1, 2025, to focus full-time on investing through Together Fund. Together Fund was launched in 2021 with Manav Garg (founder of Eka Software) and Shubham Gupta (formerly Matrix Partners India / Goldman Sachs), starting with an $85M corpus and later raising a ~$150M Fund II; it positions itself as India's first operator-led, AI-first VC in the US–India corridor with more than $200M in AUM.

Beyond his firms, Mathrubootham is a founding member of SaaSBOOMi, Asia's largest community of SaaS founders and product builders, and has personally advised or invested in more than 60 startups. He also founded FC Madras, a youth football club in Chennai, and is a self-described cricket and film enthusiast.

• Backs operator-led, category-defining companies — Together Fund describes itself as built by repeat SaaS founders who saw "literally no operator-led help" for early-stage SaaS/AI founders in India's ecosystem.
• AI-first / AI-native focus: Together Fund II invests exclusively in AI-native companies across developer tools, enterprise AI, automation, healthcare, and fintech.
• Concentrated, high-conviction bets: the fund states it makes only ~8–10 investments a year so each portfolio company gets meaningful, hands-on support.
• US–India corridor is the core geographic thesis — companies building for global (often US) markets with India-linked founding teams.
• Personal angel style: small early checks (historically ~$5K–$50K) into founders and products he believes in, often in SaaS and product-led categories; recently spreading into consumer/AI apps.
• Prioritizes founders and product craft — his stated ethos centers on "building delightful products" and mentoring founders.