Technology company Intercom has signed up 17,000 paying customers, including Stripe and Microsoft, for its services and passed the 100,000 monthly active user threshold. Its annual recurring revenue (ARR), a measure of revenue based on subscriptions, passed $50 million (€47 million) in 2016, marking a major milestone.

Intercom, which was founded by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciarán Lee and David Barrett in 2011, revealed the numbers in a blog post.

“This is big for a business product, and it’s mind-blowing for us to imagine this many humans all over the world working in our products,” Mr McCabe wrote. “These humans are now starting or responding to over 400,000,000 conversations with their customers per month. Which has doubled since July last year.”

Intercom offers products that allow companies to communicate with customers through their own websites, inside their respective web and mobile apps, and by email.

“We still feel like outsiders in Silicon Valley and the SaaS [software as a service] industry. We’ve stayed sceptical of the Valley playbooks, or at least never thought we could make them work for us,” Mr McCabe said in the post. “And in a time of excitement for things like artificial intelligence, we’ve been more interested in facilitating authentic connection (our mission being to make business personal).”

The company currently employs just more than 300 people, and is headquartered in San Francisco, but has an office in Dublin.

New product

Intercom has also widened its product base, launching Educate, which is an alternative to online knowledge bases and works with the company’s alternative to helpdesks, Resolve. Educate is making $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue, two months after its debut. “For context, it took us two years to get to $1 million in ARR for the whole business,” Mr McCabe said in the blog post.

The company said it would continue to develop and improve its products, including a pricing structure aimed at earlier-stage firms, and invest in infrastructure to ensure reliability. It will also expand its integration with other products.

“Intercom’s vision is to replace all of the separate apps or solutions that companies use to talk to their customers with one simple platform. But it might take another 10 years to really get there. Until then – and even after for areas we have no plans to invest in – we need to make sure Intercom plays nice with other products,” Mr McCabe said.

“We’re slowly and steadily expanding our APIs [application programming interfaces], and nurturing our nascent ecosystem. This is a long-term investment.”