Founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy in 2010, Freshdesk is headquartered in San Francisco. "Nishant has an impressive track record of delivering value to companies at all stages of growth in the enterprise software industry. His expertise in scaling operations across global markets makes him an excellent addition to Freshdesk's executive team," said Mathrubootham in his statement. (Statement as published in The Economic Times).

In turn, Nishant Rao, who began his career as a founding member of Epicenter Technologies – India’s first voice based call center – and  has expressed his enthusiasm about returning to his “entrepreneurial roots” and “shaping Freshdesk into a global powerhouse” with this move. "With its fresh consumer approach to enterprise SaaS, I believe we can fundamentally transform the way all small and medium-sized businesses worldwide interact within their customers," he also added. (Statement as published in The Economic Times).

With this move, he joins a list of high profile corporate leaders who have exited their well-established companies to try scaling hyper growth companies such as the Taxi-cab aggregator Ola Cabs which brought on board Infosys’s former CFO, Rajiv Bansal, as the financial head and Snapdeal’s snagging-in of the former Airtel executive Govind Rajan as chief strategy officer. 

Rao holds an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Texas, Austin. Besides Epicenter and LinkedIn, he has held leadership positions are McKinsey and ARIBA Inc, and has an industry experience with a mix of sales, strategy management and entrepreneurship spanning twelve years.