Freshworks Inc announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FireHydrant, an AI-powered incident management and reliability platform, in a move that promises to strengthen the company’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) capabilities. The acquisition will bring together Freshservice and FireHydrant to create a unified, AI-native ServiceOps solution designed to simplify IT operations, accelerate incident response, and improve service reliability for global enterprises.
Founded in 2018 by Robert Ross and Dylan Nielsen, FireHydrant has built a strong reputation among IT and DevOps teams for its SaaS platform that offers advanced on-call management, structured major-incident workflows, and integrated retrospective analysis, all enhanced with AI-driven intelligence. Its customer base spans leading global enterprises including Palo Alto Networks, BP, and Qlik.
Dennis Woodside, CEO and President of Freshworks, said the acquisition aligns closely with Freshworks’ broader goal of unifying IT and employee experiences. “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 business continues to demonstrate durable growth, and this acquisition will further accelerate our Freshservice momentum by unifying critical IT capabilities for our customers.”
The acquisition comes at a time when enterprises face intensifying pressure to maintain uninterrupted digital services. In today’s digital-first environment, even minutes of downtime can impact customer trust and financial performance. Many IT teams continue to rely on fragmented tools for monitoring, alerting, on-call scheduling, and post-incident analysis — a setup that slows response times and leads to a cycle of reactive firefighting.
Freshworks and FireHydrant aim to break this cycle by integrating Service Management and Operations into a single, AI-native platform. The combined solution will deliver:
Unified Visibility: Freshservice and FireHydrant will offer a consolidated view of all service dependencies and operational workflows, enabling teams to move seamlessly from incident detection to resolution with fewer handoffs and stronger collaboration.
Faster Incident Response: FireHydrant’s AI capabilities will automatically summarize incident context and guide structured, step-by-step response processes. This reduces alert fatigue, enhances coordination across IT and engineering teams, and speeds up resolution.
A Proactive IT Model: By pairing Freshservice’s service and asset data with FireHydrant’s post-incident insights, organizations can identify recurring patterns, eliminate root causes, and build more resilient operations. The aim is to shift teams away from managing constant disruptions and toward preventing them.
Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant, said the partnership reflects a shared vision for simplifying technology operations. “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 regulatory and closing conditions. Once complete, the integration is set to bolster Freshworks’ position in the global IT service and operations market as enterprises increasingly seek AI-driven tools that can deliver speed, reliability, and operational resilience.
