Intercom

In the fifteen years since its founding, Intercom has grown from being a small startup to being a global powerhouse and an iconic customer communications platform with a multi-billion-dollar valuation. 

In fact, it’s grown so much that the company has moved its headquarters to San Francisco, the spiritual home of the tech industry, although it maintains a research and development centre in Dublin. Let’s take a closer look at how it took the world by storm.

How Intercom Started Out

The Early Days

The Intercom company story begins back in 2011, when its four Irish founders—Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett—came together in California with a shared vision and the technical expertise to make that vision a reality.

The four founders had already worked together at the Contrast consultancy. While there, they developed the Exceptional tool for bug-tracking and error-monitoring. That turned out to be so popular that it was sold to Rackspace, the cloud services provider.

McCabe, Traynor, Lee and Barrett decided to use the funds from the Rackspace acquisition to establish Intercom, with the goal of revolutionising customer communications by providing more personalised messaging. Their California founding was just the first step towards achieving that vision.

This vision has been a north star for the team throughout their careers, from when they were building better designs at Contrast to when Exceptional was helping to stamp out bugs for a better user experience.

Growth Era

As we’ve already established, Intercom has grown at an impressively rapid rate since its inception. There are a number of reasons for this, starting with its successful funding rounds, which included a seed investment from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

After the Biz Stone investment in 2012, the company continued to enjoy a rapid growth trajectory thanks to further venture capital investments from some of the biggest names in the business. In 2013, they took on $6 million in Series A funding that was led by Social Capital, while their Series B in the following year led to $23 million from Bessemer Venture Partners.

These huge investments were soon followed by a $50 million Series C-1 from Index Ventures. Then, in 2018, Kleiner Perkins led a $125 million Series D that included participation from Google Ventures. It can be hard to fully wrap your head around all of this funding, but when you add it all up and realise the company raised over $200 million in just five years, it’s clear how quickly it was growing year after year.

Intercom’s Dublin Offices

124 St. Stephen’s Green

The company’s European headquarters are based at 124 St. Stephen’s Green, with the Intercom Dublin office serving as its hub for operations across Europe. The St Stephen’s Green location is also its largest office anywhere in the world, as well as the place where it all began. The Intercom Dublin address clearly remains important to the founders, even though the company later shifted much of its focus toward North America.

The prestigious address is located in the heart of one of the most iconic parts of Dublin, and it’s within walking distance of Trinity College, Leinster House and a number of important government buildings and business locations.

Intercom’s Dublin location is the company’s European operations hub, and it’s considered mission-critical to the continuing success of the company. It houses a number of the company’s key teams, including sales, marketing and HR departments, but it’s particularly known for being Intercom’s R&D center. It’s the company’s beating heart and the resource that they hope will enable them to continue leading the market for years to come.

How the Company is Structured

This is where it gets really interesting. Intercom Ireland is technically a standalone company, with its Irish company registration under the name Intercom R&D Unlimited Company. Established in January 2014, this allows it to maintain regulatory compliance with Irish law while its parent company, Intercom Inc., remains in the United States, being incorporated in Delaware.

There are a number of reasons why the company has adopted this unusual corporate structure, including the fact that it provides them with additional flexibility. The Intercom office Dublin also provides much easier EU market access, allowing the company to better serve clients throughout Europe and to hire European service providers. 

Then there’s the fact that Ireland charges a relatively low corporate taxation rate (12.5%), as well as investing heavily in innovation and research and development. In fact, the country has a reputation for being one of the best bases in the world for multinational technology firms, and Intercom is hardly the only company to call the city home. 

How Intercom Makes Money

To understand how the Intercom company makes money, you need to first understand its business model and the way that the company aims to provide a platform to streamline customer communications. Their goal is to make it easier than ever before for companies to build stronger business relationships by providing more personalized experiences.

To do this, the company has built a messenger-based platform that forms part of a wider product suite specifically designed to improve communication. Like most things in sales and marketing, it’s all about reaching the right person in the right place with the right message at the right time. 

Intercom’s solution has a range of tools at its disposal for achieving this, including targeted in-app and email messaging, real-time customer service and support and the ability to deploy automated workflows, bots and customer feedback tools.

All of this comes together to provide a powerful tool for sales, marketing and customer service. It’s no surprise that over 25,000 businesses throughout the world have come to rely on it for everything from finding new customers to engaging them post-purchase and turning them into brand advocates.

Intercom’s Impact on Irish Tech

This is one of the key players in the Irish tech sector, which itself has a hefty valuation of around $50 billion. It supports job creation across the country by actively recruiting creative talent from Ireland, and it is also one of those companies that attracts international professionals to come and work in the city.

Intercom Dublin is also something of a startup inspiration for Irish entrepreneurs, as well as for fellow founders from all over the world. It’s helped to position Dublin as a global hub for innovation and collaboration, and that in turn has encouraged other tech giants to look at Ireland as worthy of R&D investment.

The result? Ireland’s already thriving technology scene has been given a transfusion and a shot of adrenaline, with Intercom proving that a truly global company can grow from humble origins in the city of Dublin. 

What’s Next?

The Intercom story has continued to take new twists and turns in recent years, with a number of leadership changes reshaping the company. For example, CEO Karen Peacock stepped back from her role and became more of an advisor, with co-founder Eoghan McCabe stepping up to take over operations.

Meanwhile, the company has agreed to sublet 50,000 square feet of the Intercom Dublin office, but that hasn’t slowed its plans for office expansion throughout the city. In fact, the company’s commitment to Dublin has continued despite a challenging economic climate and ongoing disruption driven by artificial intelligence.

All of this comes together to mean that this Irish success story is far from over. In the years to come, we can expect Intercom to consolidate its hold on the market and to keep putting Ireland on the map as a technological powerhouse to watch.