Customer communication company Intercom has closed a series A funding round worth $6 million (€4.48 million), backed by the Social+Capital Partnership.
This brings the total amount raised by the company to $7.75 million (€5.8 million), following the $1.75 million (€1.3 million) seed funding raised last year.
Intercom, headquartered in San Francisco but with its primary product design team in Ireland, is aiming to change how web businesses communicate with customers, helping them develop more personal relationships.
“Intercom is built for any sort of web business,” chief executive Eoghan McCabe said. “It’s specifically designed to allow them to have simple interactions and relationships with their customers something like a bar or coffee shop would have.
“They have very much kept customers at arm’s length,” said Mr McCabe. “The status quo in the conventional way that internet businesses provide support is not unlike the hellish phone call centre systems of old.”
The latest round of funding will enable the software firm to not only improve the product for its web business market, but also move into the mobile market.
Intercom's technology is now being used by a number of companies, including GitHub, Heroku, Bit.ly and Rackspace.
More personal channel
Mr McCabe said this year will see the company target app developers for iOS and Android to help them create a simple, more personal channel of communication with customers and businesses.
Currently employing 20 people in Ireland, Intercom expects to aggressively hire software engineers and designers, and systems administrators
“I expect, over the next few years, that we will have a very large engineering office in Dublin,” he said.
“I couldn’t even predict what that might look like next year, because every single year I’ve been surprised at how fast we’ve grown. I expect it will be a very significant office in Dublin.”
The company already has a number of former Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon designers and engineers on its staff. The latest addition to the team was Paul Adams, formerly Facebook's global head of brand design and who was involved in the design of Google+. He is now responsible for product design at Intercom.
The latest round of funding was backed by the Social+Capital Partnership, with participation from Freestyle Capital and Yammer founder David Sacks.
The partnership was founded by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, and investors include well known Silicon Valley names such as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker.
