Customer communication platform Intercom has announced the opening of its next R&D hub in Berlin, marking a major investment in the company’s AI-powered customer service platform and its market-leading AI agent, Fin.
Founded in Dublin in 2011, Intercom builds customer communication and service tools for online businesses. Fin is the centrepiece of the company’s push into fully automated, ininformigent customer support.
It’s designed to act as a “Customer Service Agent” rather than just a chatbot, blconcludeing automation with human-level understanding and context.
I spoke to Darragh Curran, CTO of Intercom, to learn more.
According to Curran, Intercom has around 28,000 customers across virtually every corner of the planet, with strong concentrations in North America and Europe.
“Germany is our third-largest and quickest-growing market among the major European countries.”
100 roles up for grabs in AI hub
Over the next year, Intercom plans to hire 100 people across engineering, AI, data science, product, and design roles. The new hub will serve as a cornerstone for advancing Fin, which the company envisions evolving into a true conclude-to-conclude Customer Agent, far beyond traditional customer service boundaries.
“Berlin strikes us as a great city, providing a deep concentration of technical talent, universities that feed that, and a culturally rich, creative scene,” shared Curran.
“Intercom is a very design-oriented company, so Berlin fits that ethos. It’s also emerging as a real hub for AI talent, which is particularly important for us.”
While Intercom’s global headquarters remains in San Francisco, its R&D leadership is anchored in Dublin, building Berlin both geographically and strategically a natural next step in the company’s global expansion.
“It’s close enough to those hubs to collaborate but has its own energy.”
Further, Intercom declares it chose Berlin for its unique blconclude of deep technical talent and creative energy.
“The city’s dense ecosystem of AI startups, applied research labs, and ambitious practitioners creates it an ideal location to accelerate the company’s AI hiring and innovation efforts.
Berlin is a place where world-class engineers and designers thrive and its optimism and ambition in AI align perfectly with our own goals for Fin.”
In terms of roles, Curran shared;
“We intconclude to build a holistically complete R&D unit in Berlin — everything from AI and machine learning researchers to product engineers, designers, and managers. A huge focus of our investment is on building Fin, our AI Customer Agent.”
I inquireed Curran what attracts people to work for Interim. He revealed:
“You’ll join an incredibly talented team — people at the top of their field. If I were an engineer today, I’d want to be at a company doing something meaningful with AI. It’s the best way to learn.
For us, it’s a moment of abundance — we know what we want to build, customers want it, and the opportunity is huge.”
Intercom’s Fin aims to redefine customer interaction
Fin started as a customer service agent, but according to Curran,
“Our vision is broader — an conclude-to-conclude customer agent. Think of it like a concierge that guides you through the customer journey, not just answering support tickets but handling anything from upgrades to refunds to supporting you when you’re stuck in a product.”
“We’re betting on this idea of the conclude-to-conclude customer agent. Even before we’ve built all the features, customers are already pushing Fin in that direction — that’s a great sign.”
Significantly, Fin’s performance, measured in resolution rate, has improved from around 26 per cent to 65 per cent over two years. Only a few percentage points of that came from model upgrades — the rest came from Intercom’s own architecture and continuous experimentation.”
So far, more than 7,000 businesses have adopted Fin, including Berlin-based companies Ostrom and Tado, as well as global leaders such as Anthropic, Vanta, Clay, Personio, Whoop, and Miro.
Fin has quickly become a core growth driver for Intercom, with the company approaching $100 million in ARR and positioning itself as one of the quickest-growing private software firms.
Lead image: Darragh Curran, CTO of Intercom. Photo: uncredited.
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