Automation continues to be a key theme for enterprises, especially with the rise of AI as a tool to help fix more mundane, resource-intensive and fragmented aspects of how security and other IT functions operate. It is emphasized. To capitalize on this trend, Dublin-founded Tines, one of the largest startups in the field, announced $50 million in funding. Although Tines started with its roots in security workflow automation, it has been adopted in other parts of the IT environment. Now, on the back of a 200% increase in revenue over the past 18 months, the company plans to use the new capital to further expand the role of its automation platform into infrastructure, engineering and product applications.
The funding, co-led by existing investors Accel and Felicis, is being described as an extension of the company's Series B, rather than its Series C.
“We weren't actively trying to raise money, we were focused on building the business,” Tynes CEO and co-founder Eoin Hinchey said in an interview. “Our existing investors saw our execution and approached us. We started by talking about what the round would look like and ended up closing the round in a matter of weeks. '' He acknowledged that the choice to focus on growth is not currently profitable.
This is actually Tynes' second Series B extension in three years, with the first round coming in 2021 ($26 million) and the first extension in October 2022 ($55 million) .
However, this does not mean that there is no increase in evaluation. Hinchey declined to disclose the numbers, but other sources close to the company confirmed that the company's current valuation is close to $600 million. (As a point of comparison, PitchBook data lists the valuation at the first extension as $423 million.) Others in the round include Addition, strategic backer CrowdStrike Falcon Fund, SVCI, all of which are existing investors in Tines.
So far, a total of approximately $146.2 million has been raised.
As previously explained, the gap in the market that Tines is targeting stems from Hinchy and his co-founder Thomas Kinsella's own first-hand experience. Hinchey is the quintessential technology founder. Both he and Kinsella (now chief customer officer) spent nearly a decade in cybersecurity leadership roles at companies such as DocuSign, eBay, and Deloitte, where they sought to better manage the numerous services they use. I realized there was a huge gap in the market for a tool for this purpose. To track his company's data and network activity.
All of that has been made worse by the explosion of new cybersecurity technologies, as well as increased hacking risks due to the rise of cloud computing and related innovations. Hinchey said his team manages about 77 different products, “some in the hundreds.”
“By 2017, we were in desperate need of a workflow automation tool, but there was nothing out there that came close to what we wanted. We decided to build something,” Hinchey said. Tynes covers what he calls his “mission critical workflow.” This includes tools to monitor and track security alerts, compliance alerts, and security areas adjacent to areas where security teams need visibility, such as employee onboarding and offboarding and patch management in IT. It is. more.
“We are the plumbing between these systems,” he said.
Although Hinchey is a technology expert himself, he sees another gap in that many monitoring needs are best not necessarily a technical solution per se. Ta. Tines as a whole is conceptualized as a drag-and-drop no-code framework, a building block aimed at reducing the time it takes to create and manage workflows on the platform.
There's an opportunity there for Tynes investors, too. While there are clear and very large competitors in the market such as Splunk (and Cisco, thanks to its acquisition of Splunk this year), Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, and Microsoft, Tines, its backers, and its users are confident that their I would argue that it is more focused and more context oriented. – A conscious approach is more convenient and effective.
“Typically, customer satisfaction with security is horribly low,” Jake Storm, a partner at Felicis who led the deal, said in an interview. He said when he did his due diligence when considering this latest deal, he was surprised by how different it was for Tynes. “This is unprecedented. In 2022, it was clear that Tynes was years ahead of its competitors, and we feel that gap continues to widen.”
Accel's Luca Bocchio believes that workflow is a key missing link that gives Tines great potential to further position itself as a platform rather than a service.
“If anything, the increased security needs over the past few years have led to more security products and tools emerging, which translates into increased workflow needs. Security is part of broader IT and business operations, so it naturally needs to work with other parts of the organization.