Why has Freshworks made its most strategic acquisition to date? The company announced in December 2025 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FireHydrant, an AI-native incident management provider founded in 2018 by Robert Ross and Dylan Nielsen. This acquisition strategically positions Freshworks to challenge established players like ServiceNow and PagerDuty in the growing ServiceOps market.
Freshworks boldly enters the ServiceOps arena with FireHydrant acquisition, challenging industry giants in the incident management space.
The deal, expected to close in Freshworks’ first fiscal quarter of 2026, addresses a critical market need. Organizations currently struggle with fragmented tools that slow incident response. By unifying IT service management with operations capabilities, Freshworks aims to create an end-to-end platform that streamlines the entire incident lifecycle from detection to resolution.
FireHydrant brings valuable capabilities to Freshworks’ portfolio:
- On-call management systems that ensure the right people respond to incidents
- Major-incident response coordination across teams
- Retrospective analysis tools that identify improvement opportunities
This acquisition follows Freshworks’ strong financial performance, with Q3 revenue reaching $215.1 million—a 15% year-over-year increase. The company’s Freddy AI annual recurring revenue doubled in the same period, demonstrating Freshworks’ commitment to AI-powered solutions. The integration directly addresses the industry insight that two-thirds of incidents are caused by poorly executed changes, highlighting the need for better change management processes.
The integration plan is straightforward. FireHydrant will become the incident management layer within the Freshservice platform, creating a unified system that gives IT teams centralized visibility into incidents. This strategic move represents a domain transformation allowing Freshworks to enter new market segments with innovative offerings. Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside emphasized that the acquisition will accelerate their vision of providing an all-in-one AI-native solution for IT operations. This integration allows for coordinated responses across IT and engineering teams while enabling analysis of incident patterns alongside service data.
For customers of both platforms, including FireHydrant clients like Palo Alto Networks, BP, and Qlik, the combined solution promises several benefits:
- Unified visibility throughout the incident lifecycle
- AI-powered summaries of incident context
- Automated workflows that reduce manual processes
- Integrated monitoring systems for faster detection
- Proactive IT capabilities that help prevent future incidents
The acquisition represents Freshworks’ ambition to disrupt the ServiceOps market with an intuitive, scalable platform that leverages AI to deliver exceptional reliability and operational continuity.
