Intercom is a US-based software company that makes a customer messaging platform. The company allows software businesses to chat with prospective and existing customers within their app, on their website, through social media, or via email. Intercom is headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in Dublin and Chicago.

As of February 2017, Intercom has 17,000 paying customers and 100,000 monthly active users.

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Intercom was founded in California in 2011 by four Irish designers and engineers, Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett.

^[3] The four previously ran Irish software design consultancy Contrast, which made Exceptional, a bug tracking tool.

McCabe says the idea for Intercom came out of a fruitless search to find a customer-facing chat tool that modelled the “intimacy” of the local coffee shop where the four regularly congregated.

^[4] After selling off Exceptional, which is now part of Rackspace, in 2011, they used the proceeds to start Intercom. ^[5]

The founders initially struggled to get funding in the U.S.

Their break came in 2012 when Twitter co-founder Biz Stone invested an undisclosed sum in Intercom. ^[1] Shortly thereafter Intercom received seed funding from David Sacks, Huddle founder Andy McLoughlin, and others. ^[6] In March 2013 it announced a $6 million Series A round led by Social Capital. ^[7] In January 2014 it received a $23 million series B funding lead by Bessemer Venture Partners. ^[8] Intercom also received a $50 million series C-1 funding lead by Index Ventures. ^{[9] [10]}

In 2017 Intercom offered to pay the legal fees for those affected by US president Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims who wanted to relocate to Ireland. ^[11]

Intercom’s platform lets businesses track and filter customer data.

This data includes conversation history, product usage behavior, past purchases, payment details, etc. Businesses can use these attributes to trigger personalized, automated marketing emails and in-app messages.

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Intercom lets businesses create and send targeted in-app messages to customers while they’re logged into their app.

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Intercom relies on 3rd party services that include for instant screen sharing with customers, for voice calls and for extensive NPS and customer surveys.

A fundamentally new way to communicate with your customers It was founded in August 1, 2011 and is currently headquartered in San Francisco, California.

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