In the world of tech, some might argue that the term of the decade is AI, but in the bigger scheme of things beyond this single sector, the most important word may well be “resilience.” How well prepared are people, organizations and countries for unforeseen, negative economic, geopolitical, social and environmental developmen? It’s a question that’s trigging a lot of scrambling in search of answers.
The existential crisis that is resilience is also playing out in the world of tech. We’re more reliant than ever before on uptime, and downtime may speak to bigger crises than your email not sending.
Seizing on that demand in the market, today, the eponymous startup Incident.io, which has built an all-in-one, AI-based platform to help speed up incident management and response in the fragmented world of IT, is announcing $62 million in funding.
Incident.io is based in London with operations also in San Francisco, and it plans to use the funding for hiring, sales and marketing across both regions.
Insight Partners is leading the Series B with previous backers Index and Point Nine also participating. (Index led the startup’s $28.7 million Series A in July 2022). With this latest round, the company has now raised just over $96 million.
The startup is not disclosing valuation, but sources close to the deal tell me it’s in the region of $400 million.
The company had a valuation of around $300 million at Series A, the sources say.
Other high-profile investors in the startup include Mike Krieger and The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC.
Stephen Whitworth (CEO) Pete (CTO) and Chris Evans (CPO) co-founded incident.io after working together at fintech Monzo. There the three helped build pipelines from the ground up, based on open-source tooling, to track the performance of the company’s internal and customer-facing services and to help Monzo better respond when something went wrong.
They could see that their pain points for identifying and tracking different incidents were similar to those other digital organisations faced, and they decided to strike out on their own to build a platform to address that for the wider industry.
“Move fast when you break things,” is the company’s tongue-in-cheek motto, and it’s an apt one for any organization.
These days, the smallest businesses use a wide array of digital tools across a variety of architectures, and even an incremental update across any one of these tools can trigger glitches that take down entire systems.
Incident.io’s sweet spot is organizations of users numbering more than 200 people, which typically works out to many thousands of employees overall, plus of course potentially dozens or hundreds of different apps, microservices and other functions that bind those employees and their work together.
“The larger the organization, the more opportunity there is for things to go wrong, whether that’s with technical systems, people, or processes.” Whitworth told us in 2022.
Incident.io has grown substantially over the years. Netflix, Linear, Ramp, and Etsy are among its current customers. Whitworth said in an interview with TechCrunch that about three-quarters of the customers it’s adding are in the U.S., and it’s tripled its customer base in the last 12 months. The startup says that it has powered responses and alerts for some 250,000 incidents since it was founded in 2021.
It has also expanded as a product. Incident.io originally made a name for itself by building its primary user interface in Slack. This, Whitworth said, “was a great place to start, but Slack skews to mostly tech companies,” so as the company has grown and aimed to target other sectors, it’s also added support for Microsoft’s Teams as well as its own customised dashboard, “a compatriot to chat,” he said.
That dashboard will have the most functionality and tracking for resolutions and more, but the startup will always keep a presence in third-party chat apps, Whitworth said. “When things go wrong people jump into chat, even more and more now.”
The company has also evolved the product in terms of functionality. “Reliability and resilience” are still the primary use cases for Incident.io, and typically infrastructure teams will bring the product in and it will be used by engineers or data specialists. More recently, it’s also seeing an influx from security teams adopting it, too. (Incident.io does not currently have any remediation or other security products, nor does it specifically integrate with them: there are plans for both in the future, Whitworth said.)
More recently, Incident.io has also started to weave more AI throughout the platform. It’s doing this in a few areas.
Typically, when an incident starts to unfold, many will “jump on a Zoom call to discuss it”, Whitworth said, leaving “a poor human” to transcribe that and come up with action items. The company is now offering an AI copilot to handle that work as well as send out requests to services like Datadog to better understand what might be happening with the code.
Over time, the idea will be to enhance that work to extend as far as remediation.
The existing business, plus the roadmap ahead, is what’s brought about this latest investment.
“Incident.io is building a product that engineers love and organizations rely on to minimize downtime and maximize productivity,” said Thomas Krane, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “By pioneering AI agents that collaborate with engineers to resolve incidents, they’re not just modernizing incident response but reinventing it for a world where AI isn’t just writing code; it’s keeping it running.”
