New Delhi, Dec. 16 -- Nasdaq-listed software-as-a-service firm Freshworks has signed a definitive agreement to acquire US-based incident management platform FireHydrant for an undisclosed amount, as it looks to strengthen its artificial intelligence-led IT operations stack and expand its enterprise offerings.
The Chennai-founded company expects to close the transaction by March 2026, subject to customary closing conditions. Freshworks said the acquisition would combine its IT service management capabilities with FireHydrant's incident management platform to build an AI-native solution aimed at preventing service disruptions and improving system reliability.
Founded in 2018 by Robert Ross and Dylan Nielsen, FireHydrant provides AI-powered tools that help enterprises automate and streamline responses to software outages and reliability issues. Its platform enables IT and DevOps teams to alert relevant personnel, coordinate incident responses, automate post-incident reviews and analyse patterns to improve system resilience. The company counts Palo Alto Networks, BP and Qlik among its customers.
Freshworks said the deal would help address a long-standing gap between IT service management and IT operations management (ITOM), which are often handled using separate tools and workflows. By integrating Freshservice's service and asset management features with FireHydrant's incident response workflows, the company aims to offer a unified, AI-native 'ServiceOps' platform focused on reducing downtime and improving operational visibility.
"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," Dennis Woodside, chief executive officer and president of Freshworks, said in a statement.
The combined offering is expected to improve how organisations manage downtime by enabling unified visibility across systems, faster incident response and a more proactive approach to IT operations. Freshworks said FireHydrant's AI capabilities-such as summarising incident context and guiding structured response workflows-would help reduce alert fatigue and speed up resolution times, while also enabling teams to learn from past incidents and prevent recurrence.
The acquisition comes as Freshworks sharpens its focus on its employee experience (EX) business, particularly Freshservice, which has emerged as a key growth driver as the company expands upmarket and into additional departments within large enterprises. As digital systems become increasingly central to business operations, enterprises are placing greater emphasis on uptime, resilience and reliability, elevating incident management from a support function to a strategic priority.
Robert Ross, founder and chief executive of FireHydrant, said the two companies shared a common approach to simplifying complex IT operations. "We built FireHydrant to eliminate the chaos of incident response. With Freshworks, we are creating a unified, end-to-end operational and reliability platform," he said.
The FireHydrant deal marks Freshworks' second major acquisition in the past year. In June 2024, the company acquired US-based IT asset management platform Device42 for $230 million in a cash-and-equity transaction. Founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy, Freshworks serves nearly 75,000 customers globally.
According to Tracxn data, Freshworks has made 15 acquisitions across India, the US and Singapore since its founding in 2010, spanning customer service software, customer success management and chatbot technologies.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.