December 16, 2025
Freshworks Acquires FireHydrant to Strengthen AI-Driven IT Operations
Freshworks is expanding its IT operations capabilities with the acquisition of FireHydrant, an AI-powered incident management and reliability platform. The move brings incident response and reliability engineering closer to IT service management, as organisations look for faster ways to detect, resolve, and prevent service disruptions.
Once completed, the acquisition will combine Freshservice, Freshworks’ IT service management platform, with FireHydrant’s incident management and reliability tools. Together, the two products are intended to form a single, AI-native ServiceOps platform that supports IT teams from the moment an issue appears through to post-incident analysis and long-term prevention.
Fixing Fragmented Incident Response
FireHydrant was founded in 2018 by Robert Ross and Dylan Nielsen and focuses on helping IT and DevOps teams handle major incidents using clear roles, guided response steps, and shared timelines. Its customers include companies such as Palo Alto Networks, BP, and Qlik. The platform supports on-call scheduling, guided incident response, and detailed incident reviews, with AI used to reduce manual work and improve clarity during high-pressure situations.
As digital services become more complex, outages are harder to manage and more damaging when they occur. Many organisations still rely on multiple disconnected tools for monitoring systems, alerting staff, managing incidents, and analysing what went wrong. This often leads to slow response times, poor communication between teams, and repeated failures caused by unresolved root issues.
Freshworks aims to reduce this fragmentation by embedding FireHydrant into Freshservice. The combined platform is designed to give teams a shared view of services, incidents, and dependencies, making it easier to understand what is affected and who needs to act. This can reduce delays caused by handovers between IT service teams and engineering teams.
Reducing Chaos
When it comes to speed, FireHydrant uses AI to summarise incident details, cut through alert noise, and guide teams through clear response steps, helping teams focus on fixing the problem rather than managing updates or searching for information across different systems.
Robert Ross, Founder and CEO of FireHydrant, said the acquisition aligns with how both companies think about enterprise software. He 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 reduce the chaos of incident response, and together with Freshworks, we can deliver a single, end-to-end platform for operations and reliability.”
The acquisition is expected to close in Freshworks’ first fiscal quarter of 2026, subject to standard closing conditions.
Extending AI Across CX and IT
The move also builds on Freshworks’ broader AI push announced in November, when the company rolled out major updates across its CX and IT product lines. These included new AI agents in Freshdesk, with some customers reporting up to 80% of tickets resolved by AI, alongside expanded AI capabilities in Freshservice aimed at improving internal IT support.
At the time, Freshworks pointed to growing customer demand and increased platform adoption, as more organisations looked to reduce the cost and complexity of traditional IT and service management tools. Customer examples shared at Refresh summit showed measurable gains, including faster incident resolution, reduced manual work, and higher first-contact resolution rates driven by Freddy AI’s automation and analytics features.
