Irish tech unicorn Intercom is to create 150 jobs at its Irish operation next year to bring headcount locally to more than 400 people.
Speaking to The Irish Times, co-founder and chief strategy officer Des Traynor said the majority of new jobs would be research and development-focused, with roles in engineering, product design and management, research, analytics and data science. The company is also creating additional roles on its go-to-market, operations and customer-facing teams.
The move, which will take the total number of employees Intercom has globally to about 1,000, comes as the company edges nearer a public listing.
Founded in Dublin in 2011 by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciarán Lee and David Barrett, Intercom claims more than a billion end-users and counts the likes of Facebook and Amazon as customers.
The company has developed a software platform that brings messaging products for sales, marketing and customer support together. Its products enable companies to communicate easily with customers through their own websites and apps, on social media and by email.
Beefed-up team
Intercom, which achieved so-called unicorn status in 2018 when its valuation topped $1 billion, recently surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenues.
The company, which is now led by Karen Peacock, has made no secret of its wish to go public and has recently beefed up its executive team with a number of new appointments. However, Mr Traynor downplayed its importance, saying that Intercom's primary focus continues to be on improving its offerings.
“We invest in growth through investing in our product and so we’re increasing the teams at our Dublin office with the idea that they will contribute to the current platform but also to new areas that we will hopefully launch in the coming years,” he said.
Intercom has raised about $240 million over six rounds but Mr Traynor said he was “far more interested in the business trajectory, rather than on future financing options or a hypothetical IPO”.
Messaging foresight
The company was very much ahead of the curve in recognising the widespread move towards messaging as is evident in the continued popularity of apps such as WhatsApp. Mr Traynor said it was closely following trends in areas such as Web 3.0 and the metaverse, adding that the need to stay ahead of developments kept him awake at night.
He said Intercom had gone from being "the darling of early stage start-ups" to now also working with household names like Amazon, Lyft and Facebook. In doing so, he said the company had continued to innovate while adapting to meet the needs of larger organisations.
“The whole platform has had to mature over the years and it’s important that we continue to stay ahead. We are constantly asking ourselves what the future of communication looks like,” Mr Traynor said.
“We are an incredibly fast company. We shipped about 150 user-facing changes last year and deploy new code around 200 times a day. But everyone who works at Intercom feels a relentless pressure to find areas of inefficiency. Ultimately, technology is an innovation game and whoever is always at the forefront with the newest, strongest, most valuable stuff for customers is going to be the one that people look up to and admire,” he added.
