FireHydrant, a New York-based incident management startup founded in 2019, said on Wednesday it had acquired former competitor Blameless. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.
Both companies help Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) with the difficult job of keeping software and websites up and running. When an issue occurs, they help the SRE team find it and solve it. When it's over, they help perform a postmortem to understand what happened and what processes should be put in place to prevent similar incidents in the future.
FireHydrant founder and CEO Robert Ross said the company has been building out its services platform over the past few years, expanding its capabilities to include incident detection, containment and prevention. Earlier this year, it also added Signals, an incident alerting tool for on-call IT professionals that competes with PagerDuty.
The Blameless acquisition gives the company new capabilities and adds a roster of enterprise customers that includes CrowdStrike, which was hit by a major security incident last month. Other customers include Palo Alto Networks, VMware and Ticketmaster.
“The way we look at it, we've been building out this platform and adding all the components that really deliver end-to-end incident management. Blameless had some pieces that were on our roadmap, including enterprise-grade integrations with companies like ServiceNow,” Ross told TechCrunch.
The integration with ServiceNow and tight integration with Microsoft Teams were big reasons why FireHydrant wanted to join forces with Blameless. The two CEOs began discussing a potential deal in February, shortly after FireHydrant released Signals, and worked together for several months to come to an agreement that satisfied all stakeholders.
“So I would say this opportunity presented itself in a very unique way, and it was very exciting. And we had to work to make it exciting for our investors, their investors and the combined team,” he said.
The company plans to keep Blameless as a standalone platform in the short term, but eventually phase out the brand once all of its features are rolled into FireHydrant by the middle of next year. Blameless customers will become FireHydrant customers over the next year, and the two companies are working together to let customers know what that transition will look like.
Blameless was founded in 2017 and has raised $50 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
According to Crunchbase, FireHydrant has raised over $30 million, but the company said it received an undisclosed amount of additional funding when it acquired Blameless, which, combined with growing revenue from Blameless' customer base, should keep the company funded for several years.
The deal closed, and Blameless employees included in the transaction joined FireHydrant this week. Under the terms of the deal, Blameless directors Vas Natarajan of Accel and Dan Moskowitz of Third Point Ventures have joined FireHydrant's board of directors.