Dublin-based start-up Intercom has sealed a $23 million (€17 million) funding deal, bringing total investment in the company since its inception in 2011 to $30 million.
The customer communication company, founded by four Irish men, aims to treble staff numbers to 100 in Dublin over the next 18 months. The jobs will be highly skilled engineering and design positions.
“Intercom is a brand new way for web and mobile businesses to connect with their customers. It provides a single, integrated platform for the whole company to use for support, marketing, product, and sales communication,” company chief executive and co-founder Eoghan McCabe said.
In the 18 months since coming out of beta, the product has been adopted by nearly 2,000 paying businesses, including Heroku, HootSuite, Yahoo and Rackspace.
“With this fresh capital we’re going to bring our innovation to a whole new level, on new platforms, and in new markets,” Mr McCabe said.
Intercom will use the majority of its new capital to invest aggressively in its product, and triple headcount at its Dublin and San Francisco offices.
The company also announced today that it has appointed former PayPal and Yammer executive Mark Woolway to chief operating officer.
Mr Woolway served as executive vice president of corporate affairs at Yammer where he played a pivotal role in raising $142 million in venture capital for the San Francisco-based startup, scaling the company from 50 to 450 employees and selling the company to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.
He was previously a vice president of corporate development at PayPal, where he was instrumental in the company's early merger with Elon Musk's X.com, raising over $200 million in venture capital, their IPO, and eventual sale to eBay.
“Intercom is reinventing customer communication,” Mr Woolway, said.
“Opportunities of this scale are extremely rare, and Intercom is poised to be a category-defining company on a similar trajectory to the high-growth companies I’ve worked with in the past,” he added.
Last summer, Intercom closed a series A funding round worth $6 million, backed by the Social+Capital Partnership.
The current funding round, totalling $23 million, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Social+Capital Partnership.
