Inside an Intercom office. Image: Intercom
The Irish-founded software company, which has around 400 staff locally, is reducing its global workforce by just under 5pc.
Intercom is the latest tech player to announce job cuts amid challenging economic conditions.
The Irish-founded software company plans to lay off 49 people, including 23 in Ireland. This represents a reduction in its global workforce of less than 5pc, with cuts impacting HR and marketing.
Intercom’s CEO, Karen Peacock, told staff at an all-hands meeting yesterday (7 September) that the decision was not taken lightly.
“We are growing, but not as quickly as we had planned, and the broader economic environment has changed significantly in the past year,” she added in an email to employees.
“We need to prepare for a lower growth market environment where efficiency is even more important, and we need to keep our costs in line with our revenue. Over the last few months, we’ve proactively taken steps to reduce costs and ensure we are focusing on the most important things to continue driving value for customers.”
Intercom was founded in 2011 by Irishmen Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciarán Lee and David Barrett.
The company, which reached unicorn status in 2018, has developed a communications platform to help companies with customer relationships. It now has more than 25,000 clients, including tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft, with 600m monthly end users.
Though established in California, Intercom still has deep roots in Ireland and a large operation in Dublin.
At the end of last year, it went on a hiring spree internationally and planned to nearly double its headcount in Dublin by the end of 2022 with 150 new jobs.
Most of the new roles were in R&D, including engineering, product design and management, research, analytics and data science.
Despite cuts in other areas, the company is still planning to hire for key roles in R&D and aims to open its new office in Dublin next year.
Intercom now employs approximately 1,000 people globally, including around 400 in Ireland.
But it is not the only tech player facing cutbacks in a challenging economy.
Snap announced last week that it is reducing the size of its team by 20pc as it looks to cut costs. There have also been significant cuts recently at Shopify, Klarna and several others.
Updated, 10.20am, 8 September 2022: The article was updated with additional information about Intercom’s plans.
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