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Venture Capital News: Intercom Raises $23 Million in Series B

2014-01-22
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Simple, personal messaging service for businesses and their customers, today announced it has raised $23 million in its Series B financing round.
Intercom, the simple, personal messaging service for businesses and their customers, today announced it has raised $23 million in its Series B financing round, bringing its total funding to $30 million. This comes just six months after Intercom announced its Series A. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round with participation from Series A investor The Social+Capital Partnership. Bessemer partner Ethan Kurzweil will join the company's board.

Intercom is a brand new way for web and mobile businesses to connect with their customers. It provides a single, integrated platform for the whole company to use for support, marketing, product, and sales communication. In only 18 months since coming out of beta, it has been adopted by nearly 2,000 paying businesses, including Heroku, HootSuite, Yahoo!, Perfect Audience, Rackspace, and Visual.ly.

'The Internet is still catching up with how humans interact offline. The majority of innovation in this space is purely on the consumer side. Intercom is bringing this to business. It's a seamless, lightweight way for the whole company to connect personally with their customers,' said Eoghan McCabe, co-founder and chief executive of Intercom. 'The incumbents haven't innovated in over a decade. In fact, the separate helpdesks, email marketing tools, feedback products, and CRMs have only become more complex. These disconnected tools cannot provide a holistic view of the customer. And as a result, the customer's experience is very disjointed. It's time for a change. We were first with an integrated approach to customer communication and have inspired at least a dozen new startups. With this fresh capital we're going to bring our innovation to a whole new level, on new platforms, and in new markets. We're thrilled to have the support of Bessemer and Ethan in this endeavor.'

The company also announced today that it has appointed former PayPal and Yammer executive Mark Woolway to chief operating officer.

'I can't think of a better experienced technology executive to help scale our organization,' said McCabe. 'Mark has so far worked for three CEOs: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks. With PayPal and Yammer he helped raise hundreds of millions and with Clarium Capital he helped manage billions.'

'Eoghan founded Intercom on the premise that 'customer loyalty is magic.' What we love about Intercom is that by promising to help their customers build loyal customers through personalized communications, the company itself has built a strong following. As we considered this investment, we spoke with happy customer after happy customer, underscoring Intercom's impressive user satisfaction and engagement,' said Ethan Kurzweil, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. 'We invested because we think that happy customers is a predictor for ongoing growth. In partnering with Intercom, we can fuel that growth.'

Intercom will use the majority of its new capital to invest aggressively in product. The company plans to triple headcount in 2014 in its San Francisco and Dublin offices. Last year, Intercom grew from 13 to 47 employees.

Executive Appointments
To help scale the company in this next phase of growth, Intercom has added former PayPal and Yammer executive Mark Woolway as chief operating officer. Woolway served as executive vice president of corporate affairs at Yammer where he played a pivotal role in raising $142 million in venture capital for the San Francisco-based startup, scaling the company from 50 to 450 employees and selling the company to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. Prior to Yammer, Woolway served as managing director of Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and Thiel's personal investment operations. During his tenure, the fund scaled to $8 billion in assets under management, and the organization launched Founders Fund, made the first investment in Facebook, and founded Palantir Technologies. Previously, Woolway was vice president of corporate development at PayPal, where he was instrumental in the company's early merger with Elon Musk's X.com, raising over $200 million in venture capital, their IPO, and eventual sale to eBay.

'Intercom is reinventing customer communication,' said Mark Woolway, chief operating officer, Intercom. 'Opportunities of this scale are extremely rare, and Intercom is poised to be a category-defining company on a similar trajectory to the high-growth companies I've worked with in the past.'

About Intercom
Intercom (www.intercom.io) is a simple, personal messaging service for Internet businesses and their customers. It provides a single, integrated platform for the whole company to use for support, marketing, product, and sales communication. Founded in late 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, Intercom is backed by leading investors, The Social+Capital Partnership and Bessemer Venture Partners.

About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) invests in early-stage, hyper-growth startups, partnering closely with entrepreneurs to build durable businesses. BVP is a global firm with offices in Menlo Park, Cambridge, New York, Mumbai, Bangalore, Herzliya and Sao Paolo. With $4 billion under management, BVP invests anywhere from $100,000 to $75 million in innovative companies like LinkedIn, Yelp, Skype, Cornerstone OnDemand, Pinterest, Box and Twilio. Over 100 BVP companies have gone public -- the firm has seen nine IPOs and
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