Why this Indian SaaS Firm Launching a Marketplace is Good News for Developers Freshdesk wants to create a culture of hackathons and meet-ups pan India and are in talks with Google and Amazon Web Services to organize a wider set of events.

One of India's SaaS success stories Freshdesk, today announced the launch of the Freshdesk Marketplace. The marketplace is a big step in the direction which makes it simple for customers to discover and install apps and helps maximize the capabilities of their helpdesk.

With the Freshdesk marketplace Freshdesk aims to create a powerful and innovative ecosystem for our customers, developers and partners.Through the comprehensive developer portal, developers can now build apps for the Marketplace and make revenue through integrations and extensions.

Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshdesk said that his company wants to enable any customization that his customers need, making it easy for them to find what they are looking for under one roof and drive innovation, while simultaneously incentivizing developers into building high-quality, useful integrations in customer engagement.

"The marketplace is undoubtedly a game-changer for developers to make money, leveraging their creative potential and derive value from our customer base," he adds.

Why is this announcement important for Indian Developers?

According to the company's marketplace team, India has seen a lot of focus in B2C. "We want to bring in more development and innovation in B2B space, more specifically customer engagement and lifecycle. We want developers to have a platform where they can focus on the development of the app and we take care of all they need for the launch of their app and the marketing aspects...," the company said in an emailed response to BIZ Experiences.

Chennai-based Freshdesk wants to create a culture of hackathons and meet-ups pan India and are in talks with Google and Amazon Web Services to organize wider set of events.

Backed by investors like Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, Freshdesk in the future, wants to set up a fund to help developers build and also has events planned later this year to bring together developers and help create apps on top of the company's existing platform.

Apart from being an BIZ Experiences, Girish is also an active angel investor and has invested in startups like Zarget, Innov8 Coworking Space, The Ken and more.

More about the apps the marketplace wishes to explore

Speaking about the categories of apps the marketplace wishes to explore, the company said that it aims to find intersection for problems of today that can be solved by technologies of tomorrow, specifically in customer engagement space. There are a plenty of requests for customizations and integrations from customers that can be solved using technologies such as chatbots, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, neural networks and so on.

"We want to promote an innovation lab that promotes such innovation across industry sectors. Some of the current focus areas are Ecommerce, Business Services, IT services and call centre", the company said.

Freshdesk has been very acquisitive over the past year with seven acquisitions in place and the global company scored Series F round of funds late last year.