Intercom, Inc. is a software company that specializes in business messaging, providing businesses with a way to chat with their customers. Intercom has its headquarters in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

with offices in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

, Sydney and

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

History

Intercom was founded in California in 2011 by four Irish designers and engineers, Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett. They previously ran Irish software design consultancy Contrast, which made a bug tracking tool called Exceptional. After selling Exceptional to

Rackspace Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...

in 2011, they used the proceeds to start Intercom. In 2012

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

co-founder

Biz Stone Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone (born March 10, 1974) is an American entrepreneur who is a co-founder of Twitter, among other technology companies. Stone was the creative director at Xanga from 1999 to 2001. Stone co-founded Jelly, with Ben Finkel ...

invested an undisclosed sum in Intercom. Shortly after, the company received seed funding from

David Sacks David Sacks is an American television writer and producer. Biography He attended Harvard College, graduating with a degree in Government. While there he began his comedy writing career as an editor of the school's humor magazine, ''The Harvard ...

Huddle In sport, a huddle is the action of a team gathering together, usually in a tight circle, to strategize, motivate or celebrate. It is a popular strategy for keeping opponents insulated from sensitive information, and acts as a form of insulation ...

founder Andy McLoughlin, and others like Dan Martell, 500 Global (previously

500 Startups 500 Global (previously 500 Startups) is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, Californ ...

), and Digital Garage. In March 2013 it announced a $6 million

Series A round A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exch ...

led by Social Capital. In January 2014 it received a $23 million Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Intercom also received a $50 million Series C-1 funding led by

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/ AI, and security. Since its ...

. In 2017 Intercom offered to pay the legal fees for those affected by US president

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of P ...

’s proposal to ban

Muslims Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...

who wanted to relocate to Ireland. In 2018, Intercom announced a $125 million Series D round led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from

Google Ventures GV is a venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc., founded by Bill Maris, that provides seed, venture, and growth stage funding to technology companies. Founded as Google Ventures in 2009, the firm has operated independently of Google, Alph ...

. In June 2020, Intercom's founder and then chief executive officer Eoghan McCabe announced at an internal company "all hands" meeting that he would be moving to the role of chairman and standing down as CEO. Karen Peacock was announced as Intercom's new chief executive, effective July 1, 2020. A year before, McCabe had admitted to 'poor judgment' with female staff but was supported by Peacock, then the chief operating officer, who called him "an exceptional leader who is visionary and strategic, as well as kind, genuine and transparent". The "poor judgement" included slapping the buttocks of a female employee and propositioning another one after a night of drinks. In July 2021, Intercom's co-founder and then chief technology officer (CTO) Ciarán Lee left the company. McCabe was reappointed by the company's board as the CEO in October 2022.

Products

In 2020, Intercom rebuilt its website as a server-side rendered React application with content pulled from Contentful (acting as a CMS). No content is used in the site's

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

repo. Previously, the site was built using

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

References

External links

* {{official website, https://www.intercom.com/ Companies based in San Francisco Software companies based in California Software companies established in 2011 500 Startups companies Software companies of the United States