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Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
- bag_boy 4mo agoFin is dangerously close to Walter Jr. naming himself “Flynn” in breaking bad.
- 3uler 4mo agoWhat the hell? That is so cheap? I would value this at least as much as cursor? What gives?
- bognition 4mo agoCursor at 60B is WAY overvalued. At this point you have to assume that anything that gets touched by Elon is hyper driven financial engineering.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> Cursor at 60B is WAY overvalued. You can't possibly mean a glorified editor-shell isn't as valuable as say Nike, Deutsche Bank, Target, Ford or Nintendo?
- re-thc 4mo ago> You can't possibly mean a glorified editor-shell isn't as valuable as say Nike That's a glorified feet-shell. So like-for-like?
- embedding-shape 4mo agoSay you grabbed a random selection of just 100 million people in the world, then ask them two questions, "Have you heard about Nike?" and "Have you heard about Cursor?", what would you guess the ratio would be like? Even when you use "Nike the Company" vs "Cursor as a general search term" to compare search history in Google Trends, it's 71/5, so I'm guessing most people would say they've heard about Nike, while probably most never heard about any software program called "Cursor".
- merlindru 4mo agoIf you asked the same selection of people about Saudi Aramco or SK Hynix none of them would know what those are either though, right? I do think 60B for Cursor is way overvalued. Just not sure how to quantify
- embedding-shape 4mo agoFair point, those are valuable for other reasons. My point was more to illustrate "Nike is valuable because of the brand", without using those exact words :)
- merlindru 4mo agoah i see your point - my bad
- 3uler 4mo agoSure but I would expect an exit of like 20b or just list and go public…
- disgruntledphd2 4mo agoEuropean versus US startups maybe? While I think that this is a bad move for Intercom, it's actually brilliant for Dublin and Ireland that they have finally exited.
- alex_suzuki 4mo agoIntercom allegedly has ~400M of annual revenue, making the multiplier less than 10X. Huge customer base and established brand. Looks like a steal indeed!
- jbs789 4mo agoThe world we live in… 10x revenue is a “steal”. Lots of embedded assumptions about growth and margins to convert that revenue multiple to discounted cash flows.
- alex_suzuki 4mo agoA steal compared to other “AI-adjacent” valuations.
- tommica 4mo agoHow does salesforce have that much to spend? Like they are big, but this is a lot of money.
- htrp 4mo agoSalesforce made 37.9 billion in 2025 of revenue. 6.2 billion in net income (or profits)
- ianm218 4mo agoSalesforce had ~14 billion in free cash flow last year they have tons of money.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo agoIts the US Dollar that is worth so much less...
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo agoSpoken like someone that’s never seen the Salesforce bill of even a small company. Absurdly high
- MarkSweep 4mo agoThey had almost $9 billion in cash on hand at the end of April 2026. And net income of $2 billion. So they afforded it pretty easily. https://investor.salesforce.com/financials/quarterly-results/ https://investor.salesforce.com/financials/quarterly-results...
- re-thc 4mo agoThey're not building out AI infrastructure
- altmanaltman 4mo agothey are not just big, they are huge
- asattarmd 4mo agoBy laying off people.
- asim 4mo agoWhen did intercom change its name to Fin?
- s_dev 4mo ago30 days ago. No joke. https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/ https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/
- draw_down 4mo ago[dead]
- derektank 4mo agoThat prose is painful to read. It has such a cloying quality to it, even when compared against other name change announcements like the rebrand of Google to Alphabet https://blog.google/alphabet/google-alphabet/ https://blog.google/alphabet/google-alphabet/
- gib444 4mo ago"Fin is clearly our future" by choosing a word which means "end" in Latin and Spanish ... LOL Almost like a pre-announcement about the acquisition?
- solarkraft 4mo ago“your customer journey ends here”
- asim 4mo agoWow. So a deal like this is not overnight, its 6-12 months in the making at least. So the name change comes as they knew the deal was closing and doubled down on this new branding for customer agents. Maybe because Saleforce wants Salesforce Fin Customer Agent as a product. Who knows. Don't want to read the post...
- schnebbau 4mo ago
- davidu 4mo agoMassive congrats to Eoghan McCabe, what an amazing story arc. We love when a CEO comes back and gets the business back in fighting shape and then delivers an incredible win. CONGRATS CONGRATS CONGRATS. I freakin' love it.
- phillipcarter 4mo ago[flagged]
- nailer 4mo ago"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- phillipcarter 4mo agoFor those who are curious (since we don't want to trample curiosity), Eoghan McCabe is a known abuser -- and has even apologized for it in the past -- and he attended David Sack's Trump fundraising event for the Trump 2024 campaign, including getting a photo with the man. He has reversed his stance on immigration (favoring the current admin's policies and ICE expansion), although it was likely the case that he attended as a pro-crypto pusher more than anything else. Whether or not he has significantly invested in crypto is speculation.
- nailer 4mo agoI'm not sure "he supports the PayPal/Yammer/Zenifits guy and protecting the US border" was the massive expose you thought it was. Half of the country does that, it's not remarkable at all.
- phillipcarter 4mo agoI did not write an expose. I replied to a VC who went out of his way to congratulate the CEO, who is a known abuser and man with openly awful politics that contradict the values of those who he purports to lead. Not unlike my own CEO, for what it's worth, except for the abuser part.
- MrDOS 4mo ago> The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex When will I be able to talk to Salesforce Apex from Salesforce Apex?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- seanhunter 4mo agoKnowing salesforce a little, only if you upgrade to a different license tier.
- dzhiurgis 4mo agoYou’ll need wrap it in flow first
- hienyimba 4mo agoThe "AI" "agent" "helpdesk" they pivoted into is such a grift. AI agents still does not solve the main issues that makes a person contact support in the first place. How do I know? I was a founder in the space. but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoI guess I'll bite, what is this main issue that seemingly everyone but you are able to see?
- Tadpole9181 4mo agoIf I had to guess, there's two things they feel AI doesn't address: 1. People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services. Outside of rare exceptions and inquiries, of course. 2. AI has not advanced enough to trust it outright, nor does it have a physical body. So it can't really do anything you wouldn't already just be able to put in the UI for the customer, without needing it's actions reviewed and confirmed by an accountable human. See: accidental truck giveaways. So investing into AI support over making your business better is seen as misallocation. And using AI support instead of just improving the service is seen as inconvenient. And using AI support when it needs humans to do the support anyway is seen as inefficient.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services It'd be weird to start a startup around that, sounds like something for a consulting business instead, parent specifically mentioned they've founded customer support startup, must be something actually related to customer service, I'm assuming.
- ceejayoz 4mo agoTalk to random non tech people about customer service bots for five minutes and you’ll find most people see it.
- cpursley 4mo agoWild, the AI support and bots suck so bad, I've literally lost sales due to them. No matter how much support docs and history you feed them with for context, they just don't cut it. People would rather wait for a real person than go in loops with a wrong/bad support answer...
- dd8601fn 4mo agoThere’s essentially no such thing as good case deflection. All of it exists at the expense of customer experience. But businesses will always chase that dream of reduced customer contact, so Salesforce will keep selling it to them.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoSo I haven’t looked into it a ton, but doesn’t it seem like a great case to have an AI answer the call immediately, get the users account pulled up, and document the issue with some refining feedback? An AI secretary seems perfectly acceptable for both sides. The expectation is that a real human comes in soon after but this seems like a way to free up the most tedious parts of the process for both sides.
- uberex 4mo agoThese days it would be better in reverse i.e. expose the docs as docs and human points their Claude at that. In starting to do that!
- darkwater 4mo agoIntercom... well, Fin's announcement: https://www.intercom.com/blog/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-fin/ https://www.intercom.com/blog/salesforce-signs-definitive-ag...
- light_triad 4mo agoInteresting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago. There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outside the CRM.
- cyanydeez 4mo agocustomer support -> customer disassociation
- mritchie712 4mo ago[dead]
- willXare 4mo ago[flagged]
- ramblurr 4mo agoThis is the second company (that I know of) that got acquired shortly after an AI pivot and re-brand. See: OpenAI to acquire Ona https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491821
- beefmumbai 4mo ago[dead]
- vanuatu 4mo agofwiw i heard Fin and Agentforce frequently lost to deca and sierra, their product / team / funding weren't as good Seems like a catchup play by Marc
- xnx 4mo agoGood for Intercom. I have to assume that Salesforce will immediately rename this since any brand recognition was already eliminated a month ago.
- ubertaco 4mo agoSalesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud (not to be confused with Agentforce, which will have basically the same goals and the same target market, until they kill off Salesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud eventually).
- jmuguy 4mo agoIntercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.
- nerder92 4mo agoThis is extremely naive and I’ll invite to try and built something like this and compare it with Fin performance
- margalabargala 4mo agoThey didn't say Fin was valueless, they said it would become so in the future. 10 years from now i bet they're right. Fin is a short term play and that's fine.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoWhy would businesses do that when they can pay a fraction of a ML departments salary to a company like fin? This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product. SaaS is alive and well and will continue to be.
- jmuguy 4mo agoWell specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors. I think they mostly benefit from time in market and name recognition. The AI angle was a good bet to make when they made it, but is increasingly less of a differentiator. I don't think SaaS is dead - but I think for a product like Intercom, that is very expensive, they get eaten alive by smaller SaaS + in-house AI agent.
- kreutz 4mo agoThis sucks. I love Intercom. I hate Salesforce. I do not have confidence in Salesforce to be good stewards. Will never forgive how badly they've botched Heroku.
- sneakymichael 4mo agoWoof, yes! Though I'm glad Heroku remains, and I ought to also be glad that it has been stable all these years, …it's clearly neglected. The very first interaction I have with Heroku is a two-factor sign-in, and …it's this horrible page hosted on salesforce.com, which doesn't have retina graphics (i.e. is blurry on screens Apple have used for 15+ years), doesn't work properly with automatic one-time-code generators (because the login form is heroku.com, but the two-factor is salesforce.com), and …gah! What a mess. Thankfully you fall through into the pretty, well thought-out Heroku dashboard of yesteryear.
- sgarman 4mo agoThat new salesforce powered heroku status dashboard is a labyrinth of sadness. https://status.salesforce.com/products/Heroku https://status.salesforce.com/products/Heroku
- crsv 4mo agoHuge outcome for Intercom. I don't see the value at all, but grats to the Intercom team for getting their bag.
- twodave 4mo agoFor years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the UI already allows, so they are actually of negative value to me.
- conception 4mo agoI would say this means the problem you are having isn’t documented by the company then. AI help agents are just fancy documentation search engines. If it’s documented someplace they do well, if not they try to help but ultimately can’t. I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- itake 4mo agono... Tier 1/2 typically has greater access to systems than humans do. They can operate in ways that AI agents just don't have access to, maybe for good reasons. For example, I lost my debit card while traveling. Only an agent could route the card to my hotel.
- osivertsson 4mo agoCustomer support needs to handle edge cases. They are not documented because the company does not even know they are problems yet. Many companies win and lose here. Customers that bother going to customer support are often loyal and have valid concerns or insights. Use this information to win! In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands. Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug. My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.
- mattbrewsbytes 4mo agoAI support agents, chatbots, etc. on web sites these days are the equivalent to search engines during the dot com boom. Everyone felt that having a search engine on their dot com was the killer feature that was going to win. There were a lot of companies building search engine technologies and selling them too. Now its ubiquitous that most ecommerce sites have a search bar but nobody cares about the underlying technology much, its consolidated and commoditized. Good on Intercom for getting acquired. If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?
- projektfu 4mo agoI always hated seeing Intercom bugs when a simple help menu would work better, but it proves that being annoying is a winning strategy. As my various SaaS packages have switched to AI bugs, I have never had one successfully help me until I say, "Can I please speak to a human?"
- Robdel12 4mo agoHuge congrats to the intercom team on that! Intercom was pretty great for me during my Percy support years. Their current AI direction is rough, though. When I went to use them for my product I was (am?) building, I found intercom unrecognizable with the entire ai pivot. Honestly made me sad but that’s how it is these days
- banksybugg 4mo agoThey’ve been responsible for a number of crashes in our iOS app since they switched to agentic coding. It’s become our most unreliable 3rd party library.
- schnebbau 4mo agoIt's a win, but I'm not sure its the win they were hoping for. A regular congrats is probably sufficient.
- Lapsa 4mo ago[dead]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- alpineman 4mo agoIf that's the exit valuation of the most popular AI support tool (even Anthropic use them) then this doesn't support the trillion valuations of companies like Nvidia, SpaceX (AI), etc
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago…why? What would the appropriate multiple between them be?
- alpineman 4mo agoI can't answer that because it's irrational anyway. I don't know, how many millions of people work in support? Because the assumption that all those jobs will disappear is what is holding up the public valuations
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> can't answer that because it's irrational anyway Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.
- alpineman 4mo agoI am not going to do a DCF on this because the assumptions are all invented anyway. But back of the envelope: >> What's the TAM of AI replacing millions of knowledge workers in support? Let's conservatively assume a few hundred billion. >> How much market share does Fin capture? Let's conservatively assume 5%. >> What's the valuation on a reasonable multiple? 5% of a few hundred billion is ~$15B of revenue. Let's assume deflated 6x revenue valiation, not the 15x these things were fetching two years ago, and you get a ~$90B company valuation (that it should grow into soon at least). And it sold for $3.5b So the price is telling you the real revenue is nearer 300m than $15b, which puts the actual AI-support software market in the low single-digit billions. Not hundreds of billions And if the TAM is real but just being captured by the incumbents: Salesforce's own Agentforce, the supposed winner, is at $1.2B ARR. The "someone else is eating it" defense still has to point at the someone, and no income statement anywhere shows hundreds of billions of revenue For Nvidia to be at $5T and the hundreds of billions a year of capex behind it only pencil out if that compute throws off a huge revenue stream downstream. Support is imo the cleanest test there is to demonstrate future value of AI in the real world (literally the first thing everyone said when ChatGPT 3.5 came out was that support will be eaten first). It's the most mature, most deployed, most automatable, and the exit price of its best player is...pretty small
- redwood 4mo agoIntercom is a great example of a feature that in theory could have expanded into a more full product but stayed laser focused on that smaller vision instead. Nothing necessarily wrong with that as they did not allow themselves to become fully enshittified. Still it would be cool if they had really expanded it to offer a competition to Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud while preserving their minimalist and design forward approach. I understand that AI became the thing that invested in instead which was inevitable
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- janderson215 4mo agoI see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience is far better than the situation we have today. I never have to repeat myself and if it’s tied in with your account specifically, it’s like getting escalated to a level 3 support rep immediately.
- dawnerd 4mo agoIf it’s something easy enough for ai to handle then why isn’t it just an option on a site?
- MitziMoto 4mo agoI think you are wildly underestimating how much of a hard on people have for calling businesses, even when there are better and faster options clearly available, like clicking a button online. Staffing our phone lines is the absolute bane of my small (non tech) business.
- vanuatu 4mo ago+1 its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans
- zelphirkalt 4mo agoI am convinced, that anything touched by Salesforce is going to become an obnoxious product and at some point either become a plague walled garden one has to deal with at corporate jobs, or it dies an agonizing death, from its own user hostility. Salesforce is basically like Atlassian. Don't expect any good things to roll out of that one.
- dheera 4mo agoIntercom was obnoxious already. Reminds me of when I walk into a store and someone immediately accosts me with "may i help you" and then I walk right out. You want to sell stuff? Don't mind my existence, let me look first at everything you have on display, and I'll initiate the conversations when I feel ready.
- s_dev 4mo agoApparently that greeting is to discourage shoplifting not to put you at ease. Retail theft is becoming a huge problem, police generally won't respond to it so many of those who do it know they can act with impunity and retailers are left with few options to deter theft. It's sort like how everything being priced at 6.99 is actually to prevent employee theft (customer expects change from their $5 + $2). It's not a psychological trick to make things seem cheaper which is to actually just display 7, a single digit number. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yp3543z7yo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yp3543z7yo
- dheera 4mo ago> It's not a psychological trick to make things seem cheaper Interesting! That makes sense, though Claude seems to think otherwise: https://claude.ai/share/470906ed-6987-46b3-9e81-facfd44fc863 https://claude.ai/share/470906ed-6987-46b3-9e81-facfd44fc863 I feel like cash transactions are pretty rare these days at least in the US, so it would make sense for the psychological trick to persist (perhaps even more so because you don't actually have to hand over $7, you hand over a piece of plastic with your brain thinking it is $6ish)
- 4mo ago
- vintagedave 4mo agoIs this the same Fin that you get when contacting Anthropic support? > The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex, that is purpose-built for customer support Wow. If so, Anthropic is not using their own AI for their own support! (I had assumed the AI support agent was an Anthropic one, because, well, Anthropic.) And given how poor my experience with Anthropic support is, I have a very, very low view of Fin.
- DoingSomeThings 4mo agoThis is disappointing. I've worked closely with Intercom for the past few years. I've run Fin implementations at multiple companies. I've found their product team incredibly strong & the product to be customer friendly. Salesforce... not so much. imo - Fin's AI chat is the best on the backend of empowering teams to self-serve & integrate with Helpdesk. They don't require consultants. I really hope they don't lose all of that in this acquisition.
- pbiggar 4mo agoI'm sad to see Intercom/Fin's CEO, Eoghan McCabe, did not face repercussions after credible allegations about sexually harassing his employees came out in The Information in 2019 [1]. Some quotes: > When the woman said she, too, wanted to go home, Mr. McCabe told her that he wanted her to remain, the people said. After the other two employees had left, Mr. McCabe made a lewd remark to the saleswoman and said that he would like to sleep with her, the people said. She declined and eventually left his home, they said. > Later, the saleswoman said Mr. McCabe’s actions had frightened her, according to one of the people who spoke to her about the incident, who declined to be named. > During the meeting, Schuur said she told Mr. McCabe that his behavior was inappropriate. The Intercom CEO cried during the meeting and said that he hadn’t realized there was a power imbalance between himself and the young woman, Schuur said. > “I felt like I was just a guy at a party and she was just a girl,” Mr. McCabe said, according to Schuur. > Two former Intercom employees present for the harassment training seminar said Mr. McCabe didn’t attend. > At an Intercom party around 2014, Schuur said she witnessed Mr. McCabe slap the saleswoman’s buttocks. At a different event around that time, another former employee said she saw the Intercom CEO place his hand on the same woman’s thigh. Four former Intercom employees, including Schuur, also said the woman told them of the advances, which she said were unwanted. > A key figure in the company’s culture was Mr. McCabe, described by employees as both brilliant and temperamental, with a tendency to cross boundaries with junior female employees. > Mr. McCabe, through an Intercom spokesperson, declined to be interviewed for this story, but said in a statement: "In the early years of the company I demonstrated some poor judgment. I apologized at the time [...]" > But early employees said he also showed flashes of temper and vindictiveness. He was known for occasionally writing scathing messages to employees in group messages, according to a former employee who saw them. On at least one occasion he told another person leaving Intercom that he intended to tarnish their reputation in the tech industry, that person said. I previously tweeted about this and McCabe threatened to sue me. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/harassment-allegations-against-intercom-ceo-sparked-departures https://www.theinformation.com/articles/harassment-allegatio... cached content: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zsAytvQRuEwc0ftY3OtlXwvjvNL4T28TR9labbWeeig/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zsAytvQRuEwc0ftY3OtlXwvj...
- cco 4mo agoHave only heard bad stories over the years. Was surprised and disheartened to see him return in a leadership position.
- wgyn 4mo agoI’ll be interested to see how the merger goes. Although the products overlap, Fin <-> Agentforce and Intercom <-> Service Cloud, the Intercom/Fin stuff is mostly built for startups while the Salesforce stuff is much more enterprise. The play may be that Salesforce has the… salesforce… to bring Intercom to enterprises way faster.
- vanuatu 4mo agothis is very bullish for decagon and sierra
- rgiskard7 4mo ago[flagged]
- sreekanth850 4mo agoI don't want to buy a product that doesn't want a human to talk with me before or after sales.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ttul 4mo agoCongratulations to the Intercom founders. This is a great result for them and the early backers of the company, for a product that I feel was executed brilliantly. We can criticize the usual enterprise-sales-y trajectory and enshittification that ensued after the brilliant opening moves, but at the end of the day, I think Fin reached a solid ending (no pun intended).
- sergiotapia 4mo agoWoah, feels like Intercom just threw in the towel. I always thought they if anyone would be the ones to come out on top for customer support. Their brand was #1 in perceived cutting edge in my eyes.
- theturtletalks 4mo agoI don’t understand how viable these helpdesk companies are anymore for non-enterprise customers. We replaced our helpdesk with Hermes. It has long term memory about our business. When a customer messages us, Hermes gets all the relevant details about the customer and creates a Pi session using Gemma 4 running locally and customer talks to that agent. That agent can escalate that issue to Hermes and Hermes can escalate to us.
- dezgeg 4mo agoWhat does "long term memory" mean? It can write down notes from past/recent support requests? If so, that sounds like risk of one customer's data leaking to another.
- theturtletalks 4mo agoHermes has a character limit for its memory and it hasn’t saved customer info. SOTA models are pretty tight on not saving user data. We can also let the Pi session call the tool to get the customer data instead of Hermes.
- cadamsdotcom 4mo agoThis sounds incredible - do you have a writeup somewhere of what you did? I’d love to learn more!
- rtpg 4mo ago"This user is contacting us, and has previously contacted us about something, and we want records of this" is a basic need. > We replaced our helpdesk with Hermes You didn't just put a computer somewhere and have a customer go up and type on the computer right? You have surrounding infrastructure on that right? That is the value add.
- andric 4mo agoSeems like every time a tech company rebrands, it’s a cry for help.
- tomaskafka 4mo agoCongratulations to building a cool company that inspired thousands, then converting it to LLM reply bot, and then selling it to enterprise graveyard to be dehumanized and monetized even further.
- hvs 4mo agoAs someone with extreme phone anxiety to begin with, long waits on phones are deal breakers for me. If you are a company that answers your phone quickly by a real person you've earned yourself a lifelong customer.
- pclark 4mo agoLots of negativity in this thread, but I think its genuinely impressive that Fin beats GPT-5.4 and Sonnet 4.6 at customer service tasks: https://venturebeat.com/technology/intercoms-new-post-trained-fin-apex-1-0-beats-gpt-5-4-and-claude-sonnet-4-6 https://venturebeat.com/technology/intercoms-new-post-traine...
- m4rkuskk 4mo agoYikes, I dont think there is anything special about Fin. They claim they have their own model but it appears they are just using OpenAi and Claude as well which is hidden in their docs.
- shimman 4mo agoI thought Salesforce had a few activist investors on the board that wanted the company to stop all acquisitions and focus on the core product. Whatever happened to them? Did they bounce after they hit a payday? Company is down 30% YTD and Salesforce seems to be back on its acquiring spree.
- karakoram 4mo agoWhy does $3.6B sound really low. Intercom seems like a major player in AI customer service. What's the catch here? If I remember correctly, they were the first of the customer service chatbot SaaS companies to quickly pivot to a complete AI product. A lot of hype too by their employees and founding team for Fin on LinkedIn. I did NOT expect the final exit to not even touch double digits. Very interesting.
- kyawzazaw 4mo agoa small team can do customer service agents at much cheaper.
- karakoram 4mo agoYeah sure, but I am more wondering about the financial side of the deal. Especially in this capital and AI M&A environment. What kind of multiple of revenue or EBITDA did they get to end up with such a low number? Google says revenue was 400 Million so the multiple was not even 10x? I remember in October 2025, CEO of Thoma Bravo said that a $50 Million ARR revenue startup/company was being valued at $10 Billion. Looks like multiples have come drastically down.
- ksec 4mo agoI had to double check this is the same Intercom that started with Ruby and Rails. And it is. Hopefully Salesforce won't ruin it.
- m4rkuskk 4mo agoI wonder how long it will take for Attio to change their Chat bot away from Fin and remove any mentioning of them
- dzonga 4mo agoanother Ruby on Rails app gets a billion.
- jackjayd 4mo agoI made a free open-source version of Intercom at the start of the year called Opencom-dev after I got sick of paying what felt like extortionate pricing. What do people see as the moat here for a firm like Intercom? Is it just the existing customer-base and switching-costs / friction?
- nailer 4mo ago> What do people see as the moat here for a firm like Intercom? It's the AI model that scores higher than Anthropics on customer support tasks.
- skywhopper 4mo agoI guess all those podcast ads worked for Fin, then.
- robeym 4mo agoGiven how easy it was to get our own version of an AI service tool set up, I'm shocked to see a huge, capable company buying it's way into that functionality as opposed to using their large existing datasets to fine-tune an internal tool. Is 3.6B really the better option?