Girish Mathrubootham-founded Freshworks to accquire AI-powered incident management platform FireHydrant

Freshworks Inc., the Nasdaq-listed SaaS firm, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FireHydrant, an AI-powered incident management platform, in a move aimed at strengthening its IT operations and service management capabilities.

The acquisition is expected to close in Freshworks’ first fiscal quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.

The deal brings together Freshworks’ IT Service Management (ITSM) platform Freshservice with FireHydrant’s incident management and IT Operations Management (ITOM) capabilities to create what the company describes as a unified, AI-native ServiceOps solution. The combined platform is intended to help enterprises prevent disruptions, respond faster to incidents, and improve overall service reliability.

Founded in 2018 by Robert Ross and Dylan Nielsen, US-based FireHydrant provides software that helps organisations manage software outages and reliability issues. Its platform supports advanced on-call management, structured major-incident response, automated post-incident reviews, and analytics-driven learning, all embedded with AI. FireHydrant counts customers such as Palo Alto Networks, BP and Qlik across consumer and enterprise segments.

Dennis Woodside, CEO and President of Freshworks, said the integration aligns with the company’s broader vision of converging service, asset and operations management using AI.

“We believe the FireHydrant technology will contribute to our vision of unifying IT and employee experiences where service, asset, and operations management converge with AI to drive business continuity and efficiency,” Woodside said.

He added that Freshworks’ employee experience business continues to see growth as it expands upmarket and into adjacent departments, and the acquisition is expected to accelerate momentum for Freshservice by unifying critical IT capabilities.

Freshworks said IT teams today often rely on fragmented tools for monitoring, alerting, on-call scheduling and post-incident analysis, leading to slow response times and limited learning from past disruptions. By combining Freshservice and FireHydrant, the company aims to address the long-standing silo between service management and IT operations.

According to Freshworks, the unified offering is designed to provide a single view of technology and service dependencies, reduce handoffs between teams, and enable faster incident response through AI-generated summaries and guided workflows. The integration of service and asset data with post-incident insights is also intended to help organisations identify recurring issues and move towards a more proactive and resilient IT operating model.

Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant, said the two companies share a common philosophy of simplifying complex workflows for users.

“We built FireHydrant to eliminate the chaos and pain of incident response and now, with Freshworks, we are creating what we’ve always believed should exist: a unified, end-to-end operational and reliability platform,” he said.

The acquisition marks Freshworks’ second major deal in the past two years. In June 2024, the company acquired US-based IT asset management platform Device42 for $230 million in a cash-and-equity transaction.

Founded in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy, Freshworks offers cloud-based software for customer engagement, sales, IT service management and marketing.

The company went public on the Nasdaq in September 2021. Since then, it has undergone leadership changes and sharpened its focus on AI. Mathrubootham transitioned from CEO to executive chairman in 2024 and later announced his exit from the company, effective December 1, to focus on his venture fund, Together Fund.

On the financial front, Freshworks reported a sharp improvement in profitability in the third quarter of calendar year 2025. The company reduced its consolidated net loss by 84.4% to $4.7 million, compared with $30 million in the year-ago period. Revenue for the quarter rose 15.3% year-on-year to $215.1 million from $186.6 million.