Freshworks to buy FireHydrant

Freshworks has announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire FireHydrant. FireHydrant was founded in 2018 and has completed several funding rounds, the latest in 2024, when it acquired Blameless with additional backing from Accel and Third Point Ventures. Previously, it has raised over $30 million in three rounds from investors including Menlo Ventures, Work-Bench, Salesforce Ventures, and Harmony Partners (Source: Crunchbase).

FireHydrant provides AI-powered, all-in-one incident management. The platform includes on-call, AI-enriched automation and retrospectives. FireHydrant’s core IT Operations Management (ITOM) solution will be combined with the Freshservice IT Service Management (ITSM) solution to deliver a unified, AI-native ServiceOps solution that simplifies operations, proactively prevents disruptions, and ensures exceptional IT service reliability.

Dennis Woodside, CEO and President of Freshworks, commented, “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.

“Our Employee Experience (EX) business continues to demonstrate durable growth, powered by our expansion upmarket, into more departments and into adjacent markets, and this acquisition will further accelerate our Freshservice momentum by unifying critical IT capabilities for our customers.”

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

What is FireHydrant

Founded by Robert Ross, CEO and Dylan Nielsen, Head of Product, FireHydrant provides an end-to-end incident management platform for organisations. It starts with a service catalogue that helps organisations by defining an up-to-date map of services, their owners, and their dependencies. Its response hub enables teams to set up incident channels and respond to incidents.

FireHydrant integrates with Slack and Teams to promote a collaborative approach, enabling service teams to cut mitigation time by 90%. Thirdly, the platform supports retrospectives, learning from previous incidents to reduce time in future cases.

Several well-known brands, including Avalara, Palo Alto Networks, BP, and Qlik, use the platform. Ben Pocek, VP of Engineering at Qlik, commented, “FireHydrant is a world-class tool, mastering incident response and excelling with adding modern alert management.”

By combining the two platforms, IT teams can leverage a single solution that includes monitoring, alerting, on-call scheduling, and post-mortem analysis. It ensures a holistic approach to incident management with everything needed located on a single platform.

The retrospective qualities of FireHydrant will also ensure that IT Teams can become more proactive in resolving incidents. It therefore reduces reactive firefighting every time something happens.

Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant, said, “Freshworks shares the core philosophy that has guided FireHydrant since day one: software should make life less complicated for the people using it. 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.”

Unified experience

The combination will provide organisations with an AI-native ServiceOps solution. Once combined, Freshworks and FireHydrant will be able to offer:

• Unified Visibility. Freshservice and FireHydrant create a seamless path from recognising a problem to fixing it. Together, IT service, operations management (Freshservice), and incident management (FireHydrant) create a unified view of all technology and service dependencies. That means fewer frustrating handoffs and quicker, higher-quality service.

• Faster Response. FireHydrant uses AI to summarise incident context and guide structured, step-by-step response workflows. It helps teams reduce alert noise and surface what truly requires action. That means stronger collaboration across IT and engineering teams and faster incident resolution.

• Proactive IT. Combining service and asset information (Freshservice) with detailed post-incident insights (FireHydrant) enables teams to spot recurring patterns and prevent them from recurring. This AI-powered, data-driven approach shifts the entire organisation from constantly putting out fires to building a genuinely resilient, proactive service model.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

FireHydrant’s integration with Slack and Teams fosters a collaborative environment. It enables service teams to reduce the cost of downtime, estimated at around $540,000 per hour. Now that FireHydrant has joined Freshworks, the platform’s ability to learn from past incidents and support retrospectives will be further enhanced. It can help organisations continually improve their responses and proactively tackle issues.

FireHydrant’s world-class incident response and modern alert management are set to be amplified through Freshworks’ unified operational and reliability platform. This acquisition brings together monitoring, alerting, on-call scheduling, and post-mortem analysis under one roof, empowering IT teams to move beyond reactive firefighting and focus on building resilience.

The combination also potentially brings across some leading brands. Though it will be interesting to see whether they unify solutions with Freshworks. For example, Avalara currently uses ServiceNow for ITSM. FireHydrant integrates with ServiceNow, but will Freshworks continue to invest in that integration going forward?

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