Forget the Brexit blues, opening a base in London was an 'easy decision' for Intercom
The San Francisco-based firm expects its new office to be open this autumn.
FORGET THE POLITICAL upheaval and looming threat of Brexit, when Irish-founded firm Intercom was thinking about where to place its next office, picking the UK was an easy choice.
The customer service software company, which was set up in 2011 by Irishmen Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett, has announced plans to open a new base in London this autumn.
In a blog post on the company’s website, Intercom’s head of engineering Darragh Curran said “the decision to choose London was easy”.
“It puts us close to our customers. London holds our largest concentration of customers in Europe, and the second largest overall globally,” he said.
“There’s a rich pool of talented people in London, or people who are excited to relocate there. In contrast to Dublin, big companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google have firmly established their London offices as places where first-class product development takes place.”
The proximity of London to Dublin was also a big factor in the decision, with the two offices sharing the same timezone.
“This means our product teams can stay connected, in stark contrast to where many companies often end up, with European R&D offices as satellites to headquarters in distant time zones.
“If you’ve ever been stuck on a conference call at 11:30 at night you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Intercom's Dublin office
According to the blog post, the company is hiring immediately for engineering managers, product engineers and product designers to help “bootstrap” the new office.
Focus
Intercom already has three other offices globally: in Dublin, San Francisco and Chicago. Its new London base will focus on research and development of its newest product Educate – a public help centre solution.
Earlier this year Intercom revealed that it hit $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within roughly three years and McCabe said the company is “trending aggressively” towards being a profitable business.
Since the company was set up six years ago, it has developed four customer service products and has raised funding in each of the last four calendar years.
Some notable investors, such as Slack founder Stewart Butterfield, were part of a $50 million investment it secured last year.
With the firm having raised $116 million in funding to date, Intercom is also thought to be zeroing in on ‘unicorn’ status – a startup term for a company valued at $1 billion or more.
However, investor Dave McClure said last year that he thought Intercom is closer to a $500 million valuation.
