Intercom is an all-in-one customer communications platform founded a decade ago by 4 Irish entrepreneurs, Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett. Interestingly and in a quite charming way, Intercom began life in a small Dublin cafe – in complete contrast to the Silicon Valley launch pad of many other successful tech companies, of this day and age.
This conversational relationship platform has become widely popular because it was one of the first to allow their customers to customize their messaging platforms.
What was once a small feature in their error tracking app known as “Exceptional”, has now evolved into a company with more than 25K paying customers.
Continue reading to find the latest stats on Intercom for 2023:
Intercom Usage Statistics (Top Picks)
- Intercom is sending over 500M messages per month.
- It has more than 600M monthly active end users.
- In 2022, Intercom generated $300M in recurring revenue
- Intercom is funded by 33 investors raising a total of $240.8M over 9 rounds.
Intercom Monthly Active Users
Back in 2016, Intercom was still pretty new with only 100,000 monthly active users and 200 million conversations each month In just a few short years, they have grown quite impressively, with over 600 million users sending an incredible 500 million messages monthly. That’s a growth of 6000x!
Intercom Customer Growth
Intercom was born out of a desire to help businesses connect with customers. The realization of the need for such a product hit the four entrepreneurs when they were struggling to build that connection with the customers of their software app, Exceptional.
Four years after its launch, Intercom reported having 7000 paying customers using their young but successful company to communicate 3 million times per day with 250 million of their customers.
Jumping to 2016, the count surpassed 15,000 customers while having 1 billion Intercom end users.
According to former Senior Product Marketing Manager Daniel Harris, over 25,000 paying customers from 140+ different countries were reported using Intercom by the end of 2017. Out of these 25K, 17,000 customers were top companies like Atlassian, Amazon, Microsoft and Lyft Business. (Note- during our research for this article, we’ve noticed that Intercom hasn’t increased paying customers since 2017. Maybe this is why the founder and former CEO returned to his position?)
Source: Intercom – a current snapshot (Feb 13, 2023) from the website
Worldwide Usage
Intercom is now used in over 140 countries, with 26.98% of customers based in the USA. UK-based users follow with 7.84%, and Brazil, India, and Germany with 6.75%, 3.91%, and 3.43% users, respectively.
Source: Similar Web
Top Industries Using Intercom
18% of the Computer Software industry worldwide is using Intercom, followed by Information Technology and Services with 11%, the Internet with 8%, and Marketing and Advertising industry with 5%. The rest 58% belong to other sectors.
Source: Enlyft
Top Companies Using Intercom (Revenue-Based)
According to Enlyft, 90% of companies using Intercom are startups with having revenue of less than $50M.
Intercom Employees
Intercom started off with only four employees who were also the founders. Gradually the company increased, and in 2017 the employee number increased to 300 and 700 in 2021. In 2022, the company’s workforce had grown to more than 1,013 employees.
Intercom User Demographics
Among the total users of Intercom, almost 39.02% are female, and 60.98% are male. More than 50% of their users are 25-44 years old.
Source: Similar Web
Intercom App Integration
The Intercom App Store has over 350 powerful apps and integrations, allowing you to tailor this conversational relationship platform to your business. The most popular and widely used integrations are Google Analytics, Salesforce, Stripe and Jira Cloud etc.
Market Share Of Intercom
According to Slintel, Intercom has a market share of 6.71% in the Customer Experience category and a market share of about 3.1% in the Customer Service Management category.
Intercom Financials
The Irish-American unicorn Intercom hit its first big milestone by generating $50M in ARR in just three years from its launch date in 2013.
Source: Intercom
In 2021 it hit $200M in annual recurring revenue and was estimated to hit $338ARR by the end of 2022.
How Does Intercom Make Money?
Intercom is a SaaS company with custom plans for small, medium and big businesses.
For mid-sized businesses to large enterprises, Intercom offers four customizable plans for customers to choose from depending on their needs.
Intercom has a separate plan for startups starting from $74 per month.
Intercom Investors & Funding Rounds
According to Crunchbase, Intercom has raised $240.8 million to date over three rounds, with the last funding raised on Jan 30, 2021, from a Secondary Market round. It is funded by 33 investors, Sprints and Bessemer Venture Partners being the most recent ones.
Amount Raised
| Funding Round Date | Amount Raised | Transaction Name | Lead Investors |
| 2012 | $1.75M | Seed | – |
| 2013 | $6M | Series A | Social Capital |
| 2014 | $23M | Series B | Bessemer Venture Partners |
| 2015 | $35M | Series C | ICONIQ Capital |
| 2016 | $50M | Series C | Index Ventures |
| 2018 | $125M | Series D | Kleiner Perkins |
| 2020 | ? | Venture Round | Sprints |
| 2021 | ? | Secondary Market | ? |
Intercom Valuation
Intercom has a post-money valuation in the range of $1B to $10B as of Jan 20, 2021, according to PrivCo.
How Intercom Helped Its Customers
Intercom is trusted by thousands of leading businesses, including Fortune 1000. According to a survey conducted by Intercom, customers have seen a 31% average increase in engagement rate and a 21% average increase in customer retention.
Top Intercom Competitors & Alternatives
Zendesk
Zendesk is a service-first CRM platform that centralizes sales activity, support and customer engagement to deliver better customer experiences. Its interface is extremely user-friendly, agile and fully customizable. The CRM company offers a Startup Program where qualifying early-stage startups can get free access to their wide variety of products for six months.
Zendesk helps about 160,000+ clients in 160 countries in building deeper, more insightful relationships with their customers over time.
Salesforce
The Salesforce Service Cloud is regarded as one of the world’s most popular customer service platforms – and probably the most trusted, generally speaking. Its various features (especially Slack-First Customer 360) help businesses decrease the support volume per customer by 26% across channels and foster one-to-one marketing relationships with their customers across a variety of social platforms and devices.
HubSpot
HubSpot Service Hub is a robust software package that helps you drive team efficiency, provide seamless, fast, delightful customer service and deepen customer relationships. It’s favored over the majority of other tools due to its power and ease of use of its support and help desk features. It offers more than 1,250 powerful custom integrations all in one place, allowing easy accessibility and an efficient workflow. The Service Hub is recognized as the 2022 leader and gold medalist in its Customer Service Management Report.
Help Scout
With its number of support-centric features and easy-to-use interface, Help Scout is the perfect affordable alternative to Intercom. From small businesses to high-growth startups and non-profits, Help Scout enables everyone to build long-term relationships with their customers.
HelpCrunch
HelpCrunch is a multi-channel communication center for online businesses to not only re-engage the customers but effectively generate and manage quality leads, boost repeat sales and convert active users into paying customers. The platform offers various customer management tools at affordable prices. Whether you reach 2K or 2M people each month, HelpCrunch stays affordable with no hidden fees.
Wrapping Up
Intercom is a fitting customer engagement and conversational relationship platform for businesses to engage, acquire, support, and retain their customers throughout their lifecycle. It offers many features, all of which are aimed at building customer relationships. Intercom has become quite popular since its launch in 2011, and with the looks of the stats we provided in this article, they do not look like slowing down any time soon.
