▶ 20:32 · $COHERE · Intercom replaces Cohere re-ranker with proprietary Apex model for superior performance

episode briefing

Kleiner Perkins at Startup Grind: A Look Inside Intercom's AI Transformation

2026-06-15 · 4 company · 4 thematic

sentiment

3 bull0 bear1 neu

speakers

Founded Intercom in 2011, scaled to $50M ARR faster than any SaaS company except Salesforce. Stepped away in 2020 due to health issues (tick-borne illness), returned in 2022 with 'founder mode' aggression, led AI transformation launching Fin customer agent now doing ~90% of Intercom's support and serving 8,000+ customers including Anthropic.

quote

“We use Cohere. Again, Cohere's an outstanding company, fans of the founders and fans of the product. But, it turns out that if you train models for a very specific case as opposed to these models that are trained for general purpose use ca…”

—eoghan mccabe

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