Zarget was sold to Freshworks in late August 2017 with, by its own CEO’s account, more than 75% of its funding still sitting in the bank and more than 36 months of runway ahead of it (Inc42, August 2017). Total money raised across two rounds: about $7.5 million, or roughly ₹72 crore at today’s exchange rate (Entrackr and Freshworks press release, August 2017).
A two-year-old startup with most of its cash untouched does not usually sell itself. That contradiction — a well-funded, fast-signing conversion-optimization company choosing an acquihive-style exit rather than spending the war chest it had raised — is the whole story of Zarget. This is what a “soft landing” looks like from the inside: not a crash, but a founding team doing the arithmetic on a business model and deciding the numbers would not get better with more time.
Quick facts
| Company | Zarget, Chennai (conversion rate optimization SaaS) |
| Founded | 2015, Chennai |
| Founder(s) | Arvind Parthiban (CEO), Naveen Venkat, Santosh Kumar — all former Zoho employees |
| Businesses | Conversion rate optimization software: A/B testing, heatmaps, funnel analysis, split-URL testing, form analytics, polls and feedback |
| Latest FY revenue | $255K (about ₹1.63 crore) in its first reported year of operations, per Inc42 (August 2017); no later full-year figure was published before acquisition |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of $49K (about ₹31 lakh) in that first reported year (Inc42, August 2017) |
| Listed | Private; acquired by Freshworks, announced 28–29 August 2017 |
| Market value / last valuation | Acquisition price undisclosed; total raised about $7.5 million; no valuation was ever publicly disclosed |
| Key shareholders | Sequoia Capital India, Accel Partners, Matrix Partners India; angel investor Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks founder); CEO Arvind Parthiban |
What they do
Zarget sold conversion rate optimization (CRO) software to marketers and web teams: a single subscription product that let a non-technical marketer measure why visitors were not converting on a website, and then test changes to fix it. Its buyers were marketing and growth teams at small and mid-sized businesses, mostly outside India, who wanted the toolkit that enterprise CRO vendors sold as separate expensive point products. The pitch was integration and price: rather than buying an A/B testing tool from one vendor, heatmaps from another and funnel analytics from a third, a Zarget customer got all of it in one place, and the company positioned the bundle at a fraction of incumbent pricing (Inc42 founder interview, 2017; TechCrunch, November 2016, company-stated). The product set, as described across its own materials and press coverage, included:
- A/B testing and split-URL testing — running two or more versions of a page against live traffic to see which converts better.
- Dynamic heatmaps — visualising where visitors clicked, moved and scrolled on a page.
- Funnel analysis — tracking where in a multi-step flow visitors dropped off.
- Form analytics — identifying which form fields caused abandonment.
- Polls and on-site feedback — collecting qualitative visitor input.
- A Google Chrome plug-in that let a marketer make and preview page changes directly in the browser without writing code, which the company described as an industry-first at launch (TechCrunch, November 2016; Inc42 interview, 2017, company-stated).
The origin
Zarget came out of the same Chennai software ecosystem that produced Zoho and Freshdesk, and its founding team came directly out of Zoho. Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar co-founded the company in 2015 after each spending roughly a decade at Zoho; Parthiban had worked as a marketing manager there before starting the company and became Zarget’s CEO (Inc42 founder interview, 2017; TechCrunch, November 2016). The founding insight was Parthiban’s own frustration as a marketer. Working on marketing automation at Zoho, he saw that the CRO market was fragmented into single-purpose tools — one vendor sold A/B testing, another sold heatmaps, a third sold funnel analysis — which meant a company that wanted to seriously optimise its website had to buy, learn and stitch together several products. He described the gap plainly: the market had many optimisation players, but each one solved only a slice of the problem, forcing companies to run multiple pieces of software instead of one integrated platform (Inc42 founder interview, 2017).
The second half of the insight was about who should be able to use such a tool. Parthiban’s stated ambition was a product usable by “a tech-savvy marketer like me, without any coding skills” (TechCrunch, November 2016) — hence the browser plug-in that let marketers edit pages visually. The bet, in other words, was on collapsing an expensive, fragmented, developer-dependent category into one affordable, marketer-friendly subscription. That was a credible thesis in 2015: conversion optimization was a real and growing discipline, and India had already proved with Zoho and Freshdesk that a Chennai team could build global SaaS at low cost. Zarget’s founders were, in effect, trying to run the Zoho playbook — horizontal, affordable, self-serve software sold to the world — on the specific problem of website conversions.
The struggle years
Zarget’s difficulty was not that customers ignored it. The opposite: sign-ups came fast, and that turned out to be part of the trap. Within its first stretch of operation the company reported more than 1,450 customer sign-ups across more than 30 countries, and claimed 200% month-on-month growth at one point (Inc42 founder interview and TechCrunch coverage, 2016–2017, company-stated). But sign-ups are not the same as durable revenue, and the gap between the two is where Zarget struggled. The problems were structural to the segment it had chosen:
- A small-business customer base that churned. Zarget sold mainly to SMBs, and Parthiban later acknowledged the consequence directly: “The churn was very high, given we were still catering to the SMB businesses” (Inc42, August 2017). Small businesses adopt cheap software quickly and abandon it just as quickly, so a fast top-of-funnel does not compound into a stable revenue base.
- Acquisition cost that outran the price point. Independent commentary cited in Inc42’s post-mortem put Zarget’s customer acquisition cost above $1,000 per customer, against roughly 400 paying customers reportedly paying around $30 a month — figures attributed to an anonymous competitor rather than to Zarget, and so treated here as an outside estimate, not a company disclosure (Inc42, August 2017). Even as an estimate, the shape of the problem is clear: spending four figures to win a customer worth tens of dollars a month only works if that customer stays for years, and high SMB churn made that unlikely.
- A first year that lost money at small scale. In its first reported year of operations Zarget recorded revenue of $255K against expenses of $291K, for a net loss of $49K (Inc42, August 2017, quoting the figures as reported). These are small numbers — a company still in its early build-out — but they show the unit-economics squeeze in miniature: costs running ahead of a revenue line that individual customers were not sticking around long enough to grow.
The strategic bind, as Parthiban framed it at the exit, was blunt: “We either needed to change our business model or move up the ladder” (Inc42, August 2017). Moving up the ladder meant selling to larger, stickier, higher-paying enterprise customers — a different, slower, more expensive go-to-market than the self-serve SMB motion Zarget had built. That was the decision the company faced with its funding still largely intact.
The turning point
The single defining event in Zarget’s history is its acquisition by Freshworks (then Freshdesk), announced in late August 2017 for an undisclosed sum (Freshworks press release, 28 August 2017; Entrackr and Inc42, 29 August 2017 — the two-day spread reflects the announcement and next-day coverage). What makes it a genuine turning point rather than a routine exit is the state of the company on each side of the line. Before the deal, Zarget was, on paper, not in distress. Parthiban said the company still had more than 75% of its roughly $7.5 million of funding in the bank and more than 36 months of runway (Inc42, August 2017). It had headcount momentum too, having grown from about 25 people in May 2016 to roughly 85 at the time of the acquisition (Inc42, August 2017). By the ordinary metrics of a struggling startup — cash gone, runway short — Zarget was not failing.
After the deal, the picture is what tells the truth about why it happened. Of the roughly 85-person team, more than 40 employees joined Freshworks, and about 15 were placed at other companies, according to Inc42’s reporting on the transition (Inc42, August 2017). Freshworks took Zarget’s technology and, within months, relaunched it as a new product: on 16 November 2017 the company introduced Freshmarketer, a marketing suite built on Zarget’s CRO tools — A/B testing, heatmaps, session replay, polls, feedback and personalization (Freshworks / PRWeb launch release, 16 November 2017; Benzinga, November 2017). The turning point, then, is a company that had money but not a model choosing to fold its people and product into a larger platform that could give both a durable home — the numbers on the “before” side (cash, runway, headcount) all healthy, the numbers on the “after” side (team absorbed, product rebranded) all pointing to an acquihire-plus-technology outcome rather than a fire sale.
The money behind it
Zarget raised about $7.5 million in total across two rounds before its acquisition, or roughly ₹72 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics). The rounds, and the backers, were:
- Seed, May 2016 — $1.5 million. From Accel Partners and Matrix Partners, with angel investment from Girish Mathrubootham, the Freshdesk (later Freshworks) founder (Inc42 founder interview, 2017).
- Series A, November 2016 — $6 million. Led by Sequoia Capital India, with Accel Partners and Matrix Partners also participating (TechCrunch, 3 November 2016; Inc42 founder interview, 2017 — two independent sources).
What each backer brought:
- Accel Partners and Matrix Partners India were the earliest institutional believers, seeding the company and then following into the Series A — the continuity that gives a young SaaS company the credibility to raise a larger round.
- Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) led the $6 million Series A, the round that scaled the team and pushed the global expansion; a Sequoia-led round was, in 2016, the strongest external validation an Indian SaaS startup could get.
- Girish Mathrubootham was the most consequential name on the cap table, and not only as money. He was an early angel in Zarget in 2015, and two years later his own company, Freshworks, became the acquirer — a rare case of an investor buying the startup he had backed. Freshworks disclosed that, to avoid any conflict of interest, angel investors in Zarget received only their initial investment back, with no additional financial return (Freshworks press release, August 2017). That single line is the clearest signal of the deal’s economics: this was not an exit that made early backers rich.
No valuation was disclosed for either the seed or the Series A, and none was disclosed for the acquisition; the deal size remains undisclosed across every source checked (Freshworks, Entrackr, Inc42, YourStory, August 2017).
How it makes money
Zarget was a subscription SaaS business: customers paid a recurring fee for access to the CRO toolset, on tiered plans priced by usage and features. The model, and where it strained, worked like this:
- Money in: monthly and annual subscriptions, with entry pricing reported as low as $15 a month and a widely cited SMB price point around $30 a month (Inc42 interview and post-mortem, 2017). The strategy was volume — win many small customers cheaply through self-serve sign-up rather than a few large ones through enterprise sales.
- The bundle as the pitch: the revenue case rested on offering A/B testing, heatmaps, funnel analysis and form analytics together at “10% of the cost” of buying separate incumbent tools (Inc42 interview, 2017, company-stated) — trading margin per customer for a larger addressable base of price-sensitive SMBs.
- Costs out: as with any SaaS, engineering and product were the fixed build cost, but the load-bearing line was sales and marketing — the cost of acquiring each customer. With CAC estimated above $1,000 (outside estimate, Inc42, 2017) against ~$30-a-month revenue, a customer needed to stay well over two years just to repay acquisition cost.
- Where the margin sat — and did not: the theoretical margin of a self-serve SaaS is high once a customer is retained. Zarget’s problem was retention: high SMB churn meant many customers left before their subscription revenue had covered what it cost to win them. The part people get wrong is assuming cheap, fast-growing sign-ups equal a healthy SaaS business; without retention, a low price and a high acquisition cost combine into negative unit economics no matter how fast the top of the funnel grows.
The numbers
Zarget operated for only about two years as an independent company before its 2017 acquisition, so a multi-year public financial record of the kind larger startups leave behind does not exist. The one detailed set of operating figures that reached the public record comes from Inc42’s August 2017 reporting, covering the company’s first year of operations; the rupee equivalents below are the figures as Inc42 reported them at the time (unit: US dollars, with the source’s contemporaneous rupee conversion).
| Metric (first reported year of operations) | Value (as reported by Inc42, August 2017) |
| Revenue | $255K (about ₹1.63 crore) |
| Expenses | $291K (about ₹1.86 crore) |
| Net loss | $49K (about ₹31 lakh) |
- Loss-making, but at small scale: the company spent more than it earned in its first reported year, consistent with an early-stage SaaS build-out, not a blow-up (Inc42, August 2017).
- The unmet target: Zarget publicly aimed to reach $2 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2017 (Inc42 and TechCrunch coverage, 2016–2017, company-stated) — a target the acquisition, announced in August 2017, pre-empted before any full-year result could confirm or refute it.
- Cash, not revenue, was the story: the most-cited number about Zarget’s finances is not its revenue but its unspent capital — over 75% of about $7.5 million still in the bank at exit, with 36-plus months of runway (Inc42, August 2017). The decision to sell was driven by the model, not by running out of money.
Where the money comes from
Zarget never published a formal revenue split by geography or segment, so the breakdown here is built from its disclosed customer base and go-to-market rather than exact percentages:
- By segment: overwhelmingly small and mid-sized businesses on self-serve subscriptions; the company itself identified SMBs as its core base and named this as the source of its high churn (Inc42, August 2017).
- By geography: a global, non-India-centric base — more than 1,450 sign-ups across 30-plus countries, with over 250 of them paying customers at the time of acquisition (Inc42 buzz and founder interview, 2017). Named customers included Buscape in Brazil and Carro, alongside Freshdesk itself, pointing to a customer list that skewed international rather than domestic (Inc42 founder interview, 2017).
- The surprise: the numbers reveal how thin the paying layer really was. Against 1,450-plus sign-ups, only 250-plus were paying customers — a conversion from free/trial interest to revenue of roughly one in six. A large, global, fast-growing sign-up base was sitting on top of a small paying base, which is the clearest single explanation for why a company with money in the bank still concluded the model would not scale on its own terms.
The risks
Zarget’s story is now closed, but the risks that shaped its outcome are concrete and disclosed, and each carries a clear mechanism:
- SMB churn against high acquisition cost (the fatal one). The company sold cheaply to small businesses that did not stay. With CAC estimated above $1,000 (outside estimate, Inc42, 2017) and revenue around $30 a customer per month, high churn meant many customers churned out before repaying their acquisition cost — the mechanism that turns fast sign-up growth into a losing business. Parthiban named the churn himself (Inc42, August 2017).
- A crowded, commoditizing category. CRO in 2015–2017 already had well-funded incumbents (the market’s larger players sold A/B testing, heatmaps and analytics as premium tools) plus a stream of new entrants. Zarget competed on price and bundling, but competing on price in a category where features converge erodes both margin and differentiation — the company’s stated need to “change our business model or move up the ladder” is exactly the symptom of being squeezed in a commoditizing middle (Inc42, August 2017).
- The move-upmarket dilemma. The obvious fix — sell to larger, stickier enterprise customers — required a slower, costlier, sales-led motion that a small team built for self-serve SMB volume was not set up to run. Attempting that transition would have burned the cash Zarget still had, with no guarantee of success; choosing not to attempt it, and to sell instead, was the founders’ assessment of that risk playing out in real time (Inc42, August 2017).
The takeaway
Zarget’s lesson is that runway buys time, but it does not fix a business model — and a good founding team knows the difference. The company had done the hard, visible things well: it had built a genuinely integrated product, priced it aggressively, signed up more than 1,450 customers in over 30 countries, and grown its team from 25 to 85 people, all inside roughly two years and on modest capital. It also had most of that capital still in the bank. What it did not have was a set of unit economics that would turn any of that motion into a self-sustaining business, because the customers it was best at winning were the customers least likely to stay. Faced with that, the founders did not spend three more years and their remaining millions trying to force an SMB self-serve model to behave like an enterprise one. They sold to a company that could give the product and the team a larger platform to live on, and accepted an outcome where even the angel investors got only their money back. The transferable point is uncomfortable but useful: cheap, fast customer growth is not proof of a business; retention and the cost of acquisition are. When the math on those two never closes, more runway just funds a longer version of the same problem — and the disciplined move can be to stop early, while the cash and the team still have value to someone else.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Zarget and when?
Zarget was founded in Chennai in 2015 by Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santosh Kumar, all three former Zoho employees with roughly a decade each at the company. Parthiban, previously a marketing manager at Zoho, was Zarget’s CEO (Inc42 founder interview, 2017; TechCrunch, November 2016).
What did Zarget make?
Conversion rate optimization software for marketers: an integrated subscription tool combining A/B testing, heatmaps, funnel analysis, split-URL testing, form analytics, and polls and feedback, plus a Chrome plug-in for making page changes without code. The pitch was one affordable bundle in place of several expensive point tools (TechCrunch, November 2016; Inc42, 2017).
How much did Zarget raise, and who backed it?
About $7.5 million across two rounds: a $1.5 million seed in May 2016 (Accel Partners, Matrix Partners, and angel Girish Mathrubootham) and a $6 million Series A in November 2016 led by Sequoia Capital India, with Accel and Matrix participating (Inc42 interview, 2017; TechCrunch, November 2016; Entrackr, August 2017).
Why was Zarget acquired if it still had cash?
By CEO Arvind Parthiban’s account, the company still had over 75% of its funding and 36-plus months of runway at the time, but faced a model problem: it sold cheaply to small businesses that churned heavily, against a high customer acquisition cost. Rather than spend its remaining cash trying to move upmarket, the team sold to Freshworks (Inc42, August 2017).
What happened to Zarget after Freshworks bought it?
Freshworks acquired Zarget in late August 2017 for an undisclosed sum. More than 40 of about 85 employees joined Freshworks, and around 15 were placed elsewhere. On 16 November 2017, Freshworks relaunched Zarget’s technology as Freshmarketer, a marketing suite offering A/B testing, heatmaps, session replay, polls, feedback and personalization (Inc42, August 2017; Freshworks/PRWeb, November 2017).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, “Zarget’s Unit Economics Shows Why Acquisition By Freshworks Was Their Last Ditch Effort,” August 2017
- Inc42, “SaaS Business Software Provider Freshworks Makes Ninth Acquisition, Takes Over Zarget,” August 2017
- Inc42, “Selling SaaS Globally From India Is Not A Big Problem If One Has A Good Product — Arvind Parthiban, Zarget” (founder interview), 2017
- TechCrunch, “Zarget raises $6M Series A to help marketers optimize their websites,” November 2016
- Entrackr, “Freshworks acquires marketing software startup Zarget,” August 2017
- Freshworks, press release, “Freshworks Acquires Marketing Software Provider Zarget,” August 2017
- Freshworks / PRWeb, “Freshworks Launches Freshmarketer — Marketing Software for Digital Marketers,” 16 November 2017
- Benzinga, “Freshworks Launches Freshmarketer,” November 2017
- Crunchbase, Zarget company profile and funding data, accessed September 2026
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