Automation continues to be an important topic in enterprises – underscored in no small part by the rise of AI as a tool to address some of the more routine, resource-intensive and fragmented aspects of how security and other IT functions operate. To capitalize on this trend, one of the industry’s larger startups, Dublin-founded Tines, is announcing $50 million in funding. Tines started with its roots in security workflow automation, but has also spread to other parts of the IT landscape. Driven by 200% revenue growth over the past 18 months, the company now plans to use the new capital to further expand its automation platform into infrastructure, engineering and product applications.
The funding – co-led by existing investors Accel and Felicis – is described as an extension of the company’s Series B rather than a Series C.
“We weren’t proactive about trying to raise money, we were focused on building the business,” Eoin Hinchy, CEO and co-founder of Tines, said in an interview. “Our existing investors saw our implementation and approached us. “We first discussed what a round could look like and closed it in a few weeks.” He confirmed that it was not currently profitable to focus on growth voluntarily.
This actually makes this the second extension of Tines Series B in three years, with the initial round coming in 2021 ($26 million) and the first extension coming in October 2022 ($55 million).
But it’s not without a ratings boost. Hinchy declined to disclose the figures, but other sources close to the company confirmed that the company’s value is now close to $600 million after the deal closes. (For comparison, PitchBook data shows the valuation at the first extension was $423 million.) Other participants in this round include Addition, strategic backer CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and SVCI – all existing investors in Tines.
A total of around 146.2 million US dollars has now been collected.
As we described previously, the market gap Tines is targeting comes from the direct experience of Hinchy and his co-founder Thomas Kinsella. Hinchy is a classic technical founder. He and Kinsella (now Chief Customer Officer) both spent about a decade in senior cybersecurity positions for companies such as DocuSign, eBay and Deloitte, where they discovered major gaps in the market for tools to manage the vast number of services they use could better manage to track data and network activity for their companies.
All of this has been exacerbated not only by the explosion of new cybersecurity techniques, but also by hacking risks that have arisen from the rise of cloud computing and related innovations. Hinchy estimated for me that the average security team manages about 77 different products, “some in the hundreds.”
“In 2017, we desperately needed a workflow automation tool, but nothing out there came close to what we wanted, so we decided to build what we wanted,” said Hinchy. Tines covers what he calls “mission-critical workflows,” which in the security space includes tools for monitoring and tracking security alerts, compliance alerts, and increasingly, areas adjacent to areas where security teams need visibility, such as: B. onboarding and offboarding of employees as well as patch management in IT and more.
“We are the connection between these systems,” he said.
While Hinchy himself is tech-savvy, he saw another gap in that much of the need for surveillance could best be met by not having to be a technical solution per se. The entire Tines system is designed in a no-code, drag-and-drop framework, the building blocks of which are aimed at reducing the time spent creating and managing workflows on the platform.
This is also an opportunity for Tines’ investors. Although there are clear and very large competitors in the market, including Splunk (and now Cisco after Splunk was acquired this year), Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow and Microsoft, Tines and its supporters and users would argue that they are more focused and A more context-aware approach is more useful and effective.
“Customer satisfaction is typically shockingly low when it comes to security,” Jake Storm, the partner at Felicis who led the deal, said in an interview. He said he was surprised when he was conducting due diligence discussions when weighing this latest deal at how different it was for Tines. “This is simply outrageous. It was just obvious that Tines was years ahead of its competitors in 2022 and we just feel like that gap continues to widen.”
Accel’s Luca Bocchio sees workflow as the crucial missing link that gives Tines a lot of potential to further position itself as a platform rather than a service.
“If anything, the increase in security requirements in recent years has led to more security products and tools, which ultimately leads to higher workflow requirements. This means that Tines is becoming more and more relevant. Of course, because security is part of broader IT and business operations, it also needs to work with the rest of the organization.”