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Intercom is gearing up to take its marketing and customer connection tools to mobile after raising $6 million in an A-round of financing. The Social+Capital Partnership led the round, Intercom is gearing up to take its marketing and customer connection tools to mobile after raising $6 million in an A-round of financing. The Social+Capital Partnership led the round, which will largely go to building out the company’s mobile strength.
Intercom’s latest round of capital comes from The Social+Capital Partnership, with participation from Freestyle Capital and David Sacks, founder and CEO of Yammer. Social+Capital was founded by Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of growth at Facebook FB+0.47%. “He basically grew Facebook from 30 million people to close to a billion people,” said Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe.
Social+Capital partner, Mamoon Hamid, will be joining Intercom’s board. Hamid had previously served on the boards of cloud services company, Box, and social network Yammer.
Aside from its marketing tools, Intercom is an interesting player because Paul Adams, former Google GOOG-0.02% researcher (he supposedly had a hand in that company’s Google+ Circles concept) and Facebook product manager, is on board as head of design.
Intercom, based in San Francisco with its engineering and design team in Dublin, Ireland; has come up with a product that allows businesses easy access to data on their customers or members—like name, how long they’ve been a customer/member, when they last logged on, their ages, home town, etc. Custom searches and category allocation are possible, making it easy for businesses to zero in on who’s using their services by any number of filters . With that kind of intel in hand, companies – or marketers – can easily correspond and target them for special offers or customers service support requests.“What we’re trying to do is replace a whole bunch of old-school communications products,” says McCabe. Products McCabe says Intercom can disrupt include helpdesks, marketing tools and marketing automation tools. “We looked at the incumbent (firms) in the market as we were building Intercom – great businesses like Zendesk, Constant Contact CTCT-0.59%– and we realized for this current generation of internet business, those tools aren’t very well configured for the way that they need to communicate with their customers.”
Ultimately, says McCabe, creating more personal connections to customers is something that businesses have historically sought to establish and only now is the technology that drives web and mobile-based commerce – through social networking, customer data and more engaging interaction – starting to catch up.
The company won’t disclose how many clients they have. McCabe merely said “thousands,” which could mean a lot of things. Next Next up is building a mobile app to allow clients to manage their customers on other devices, McCabe said. Where some companies would use a capital infusion to boost company awareness and business through marketing and sales, Intercom plans to continue developing its tool. “We’re just going to go deep on the product and the service as a way to grow our customer base.” The mobile product will be available in beta within the next three months.Intercom’s pricing starts at a basic tool for free, and other tiers of service for $49, $149, and $449 per month, with additional fees depending on how many thousands of customers an enterprise is tracking.
Last year, Intercom raised $1.75M in seed funding from 500 Startups, Freestyle Capital, and angels including Biz Stone.
Karsten Strauss, Forbes Staff