- The San Francisco-based messaging platform Intercom raised $125 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures.
- Intercom is now valued at $1.275 billion, which means it’s officially a unicorn.
- The company plans to use its funding to expand research and development and grow its team globally.
Intercom believes that e-mail is on its deathbed, and some of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors agree.
Intercom, which sells a messaging platform aimed at sales and marketing teams, raised $125 million in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures, the company announced on Tuesday.
Mary Meeker, a Kleiner Perkins investor known for her influential annual internet trend reports, led the investment and will join the Intercom board as an observer.
The company is now valued at $1.275 billion, which means it’s officially part of the unicorn club of extremely high-value private companies such as Uber and Airbnb.
Eoghan McCabe, CEO and co-founder of Intercom, said he’s amazed by the company he’s built, but added that achieving unicorn status was never his goal for the company.
“If I look back to 2011 when I started this thing, could we even have dreamed that we’d build a company as valuable as this? Absolutely not,” McCabe told Business Insider.
“On the other side of things, it’s an arbitrary number. It’s the kind of thing that happens when you have some combination of good fortune and luck, and work your ass off and obsess about making your customers very happy and successful,” McCabe said.
Intercom, which is headquartered in San Francisco, plans to use the funding to grow its research and development teams both in California, and at its offices in Chicago, London and Dublin.
The company will also launch an office in Sydney this summer. The company currently employees around 500 people globally, and intends to add another 350 employees in the next 17 months.
A mystery product in the pipeline
Despite selling a product that enables remote communication, Intercom as a company is against telecommuting.
McCabe said that team members always work in the same location as their teammates. Part of Intercom’s global strategy involves opening offices where clusters of talented workers live.
While the company’s core product is its messaging platform, McCabe teased an unrelated product that will come to market later this year.
He declined to share more about what it could be, but described it in a blog post as “something everyone will be excited to experiment with, and which quite a lot of you will get a ton of value from.”
McCabe is even more evasive on the question of when an IPO might be coming, insisting that he’s focused solely on shipping products.
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