Automation continues to be an important topic in business – highlighted primarily by the rise of artificial intelligence as a tool to help fix some of the most common, resource-intensive and fragmented aspects of how security and other IT functions work. To capitalize on this trend, one of the biggest startups in the space, founded out of Dublin Tines, announces $50 million in funding. Tines started with its roots in security workflow automation, but has been adopted in other parts of the IT landscape. Now, with revenue growing 200% over the past 18 months, it plans to use the new capital to expand its automation platform into infrastructure, engineering and product applications.
The funding — 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 trying to grow preemptively and focused on building the business,” Tines CEO and co-founder Eoin Hinchy said in an interview. “Our existing investors saw our execution and approached us. We went from talking about what a round could look like, to the end of it in a couple of weeks.” He confirmed that it is not profitable at this time by choice, to focus on growth.
That actually makes this Tines’ second Series B expansion in three years, with the initial round coming in 2021 (at $26 million) and the first expansion in October 2022 ($55 million).
But it is not without an increase in valuation. Hinchy declined to disclose numbers, but other sources close to the company confirmed that the meta-currency is now worth close to $600 million. (As a point of comparison, PitchBook data notes that it was valued at $423 million in the first round.) Others in this round include Addition, strategic backer CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and SVCI — all existing investors in Tines.
It has now raised around $146.2 million in total.
As we’ve described before, the gap in the market Tines is targeting comes from the direct experience of Hinchy and co-founder Thomas Kinsella. Hinchy is a classic technical founder. He and Kinsella (now chief client) both about a decade passed working in cybersecurity leadership roles for companies such as DocuSign, eBay, and Deloitte, where they found large gaps in the market for tools to help better manage the large number of services they used to monitor data and network activity for his companies.
All this has been exacerbated not only by the explosion of new cyber security techniques but also by the hacking risks that have arisen from the rise of cloud computing and related innovations. Hinchy estimated to me that the average security team manages about 77 different products, with “some in the hundreds.”
“By 2017 we were in desperate need of a workflow automation tool and really nothing out there came close to what we wanted, so we decided to build what we wanted,” Hinchy said. Tines covers what he describes as “mission-critical workflows,” which in security include tools to monitor and track security alerts, compliance alerts, and increasingly areas adjacent to where security teams need visibility, such as boarding and offloading employees, managing IT patches and more.
“We’re the plumbing between those systems,” he said.
Although Hinchy is a technician himself, he saw that another gap was that the great need for tracking was better served by not having to be a technical solution in itself. The entirety of Tines is designed around a drag-and-drop, no-code framework, building blocks that aim to reduce the time required to create and manage workflows on the platform.
Therein lies the opportunity for Tines investors as well. Although there are clear and very large competitors in the market, including Splunk (and now Cisco due having acquired Splunk this year), Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow and Microsoft, Tines and its supporters and users will claim that their focused and more conscious approach is more useful and effective.
“Customer satisfaction is typically incredibly low on security,” Jake Storm, the Felicis partner who led the deal, said in an interview. He said he was surprised, when he made the due diligence calls when weighing this latest deal, how different this was for Tynes. “This is unheard of. It was simply obvious that Tines was years ahead of its competitors in 2022 and we just feel that the gap has continued to widen.”
Luca Bocchio at Accel sees workflow as the key missing link, which gives Tines a lot of potential to further position itself as a platform, not a service.
“If anything in recent years, the increase in security needs has led to more security products and tools, and that translates into more workflow needs. This means Tines is becoming more relevant. As security is part of broader IT and business functions, it naturally needs to work with the rest of the organization.”
