Intercom – Making Internet Business Personal

Intercom is a customer communication platform that unifies every aspect of the customer journey, from conversation to engagement to support.

And now it has become a portfolio company of Fabrica Ventures Fund II.

In a nutshell:

* Founded in 2011 by four Irish friends; headquarter in SF

* Already a $250M revenue company

* 25K+ clients in 140 countries

* Over 180K teammates log into Intercom every month, sending over 500M messages and replying to over 18M conversations monthly

* Operates near break-even and no new equity funding round since 2018 (“only” $240M of total equity raised) and enough cash to support operation for the next years

* Simple, easy and well engineered solution – Intercom embeds itself in their customers website and so has on-going visibility into all their visitors

* Most advanced customer service’s AI chatbot, Fin, which can ingest customers’ support docs and use LLMs do interpret the meaning behind a question, provide an answer, and autonomously resolve 80% of the queries

* Largest competitor, Zendesk, was recently acquired by a PE for $10.2B and now is passing through an “internal squeeze moment”

* No competing startup is a real threat

* Backed by notable VCs: Bessemer Venture Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Index Ventures and Social Capital

* Highly regarded: 7 years in a row in the Cloud 100

Conclusion

Intercom is a rare breed of startup that managed to consistently deliver solid (25%+) annual growth, while operating near break even.

The standards for customer service online are terrible. After all, companies are “limited by the physics of time and human energy and by the economics involved in being able to afford enough people to respond to everyone immediately”.

“The problem that great AI solves for customer service is that it can actually give great instant answers”.

The future of customer service is AI plus humans, and Intercom is in the forefront of this customer experience breakthrough.