The Idea

In 2011, four Irish engineers sat in a Dublin coffee shop and watched the owner work. He knew every regular by name, remembered their orders, asked about their lives. He was scaling a business on personal connection, the exact thing the internet had quietly stripped out of commerce.

Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett had just sold their bug-tracking tool, Exceptional, to Rackspace. They knew the problem first-hand. As a small SaaS company, they had customers they wanted to talk to and no decent way to do it. Online business had become a wall of ticket numbers, mass emails and dead FAQ pages.

So they took the coffee-shop insight and built software around it. One place where any company could actually talk to its customers, personally, at scale. McCabe took a €2,200 loan from Allied Irish Bank to cover the flights, moved to San Francisco, and went looking for money.This was the beginning of Fin.

The Execution

• August 2011: McCabe, Traynor, Lee and Barrett founded Intercom in Dublin on the proceeds of the Exceptional sale, with one pitch: "make internet business personal."
• 2014: The four Irishmen had convinced investors to part with $30M and were running a 30-person team out of Dublin on a stated mission to build a billion-dollar company.
• 2018: A $125M Series D pushed Intercom to a $1.275B valuation and unicorn status. Its smiley chat bots were sitting on the homepages of Amazon, Facebook and Lyft.
• June 2020: After almost a decade in charge, McCabe stepped down as CEO and handed the reins to COO Karen Peacock. Revenue sat around $150M across 30,000+ paying customers, and the company trimmed 39 roles.
• October 2022: With revenue at roughly $200M but the company drifting, the board asked McCabe to come back as CEO. He returned vowing to pick a lane, go head-to-head with Zendesk, and run Intercom like a startup again.
• Late 2022: McCabe cut 13% of staff, sublet part of the new Dublin office and ran a line-by-line review of costs to free up cash without raising. "We were sloppy like many other companies," he said.
• May 2023: Intercom launched Fin, an AI agent that resolved customer queries autonomously, built first on OpenAI's GPT-4 and later Anthropic's Claude. It priced at 99 cents per resolution, outcome-based, roughly a year ahead of rivals.
• March 2026: Intercom raised $250M to pour into Fin, which had crossed $100M ARR growing 350% a year across roughly 8,000 businesses. The company also built its own post-trained model, Apex, to cut its dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic. Overall ARR topped $400M.
• May 2026: The company [rebranded from Intercom to Fin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercom,_Inc.) to cap the transformation from chat widget to AI agent.
• June 2026: Salesforce agreed to acquire Fin for $3.6 billion, folding its 76%-resolution agent into Agentforce.

The lesson?

Intercom was a 15-year-old SaaS company everyone had filed under "sleepy chat widget," the exact kind of incumbent AI was supposed to eat alive. Instead McCabe tore the place back down to a startup, picked one lane, and bet the entire business on an agent priced by the outcome, a full year before rivals moved. The companies AI kills are the ones that defend the old model. Intercom got to $3.6B by disrupting its own.