Freshworks Expands IT Operations With FireHydrant Acquisition

Freshworks Inc.  has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FireHydrant, a provider of AI-powered Incident Management software. The combination will bring together Freshservice’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and FireHydrant’s core IT Operations Management (ITOM) as a unified AI-native ServiceOps solution designed to simplify operations, proactively prevent disruptions, and ensure exceptional IT service reliability. 

Co-founded by Robert Ross and Dylan Nielsen in 2018, FireHydrant has deep expertise in IT and DevOps with customers across consumer and business industries including Palo Alto Networks, BP, and Qlik. The company’s software-as-a-service provides advanced on-call management, structured major-incident response, and integrated retrospective analysis embedded with 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," said Dennis Woodside, CEO and President of Freshworks. "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.”

In today's digital-first economy, every minute of downtime is a threat to brand reputation and financial stability. IT teams face the immense challenge of managing incident chaos using disparate tools for monitoring, alerting, on-call scheduling, and post-mortem analysis. This complexity leads to slow, manual incident response and a failure to learn from past disruptions, trapping teams in a never-ending cycle of reactive firefighting. 

Together, FireHydrant and Freshservice seek to eliminate the critical pain points caused by the long-standing problem of siloed Service Management and IT Operations. The unified experience of an AI-native ServiceOps solution is designed to enable:

• Unified Visibility. Freshservice and FireHydrant create a seamless path from recognizing 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 utilizes AI to summarize incident context and guide structured, step-by-step response workflows to help 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 ever happening again. This AI-powered, data-driven approach shifts the entire organization from constantly putting out fires to building a genuinely resilient and proactive service model.

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.”

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