Irish cybersecurity start-up Tines valued at $300m after raising $26m

Irish cybersecurity automation start-up Tines has raised $26 million (€21.9 million) giving it a market valuation of $300 million.

Addition, an investment firm led by former Tiger Global Management veteran Lee Fixel led the financing which brings total funding to date to more than $41.1 million.

Accel, a well-known tech-focused VC firm that has previously backed the likes of Slack, Facebook, Spotify and Qualtrics, also participated in the funding round having previously co-led an $11 million raise for Tines in late 2019 with Index Ventures.

Blossom Capital also participated again while in addition the company received strategic backing from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike and Silicon Valley CISO, a group of chief information security officers that operates as an angel investor syndicate.

Tines was founded by Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella in 2018. The pair are experienced cybersecurity experts having previously worked for decades for the likes of eBay, DocuSign and PayPal prior to establishing the company.

The company has developed software that allows employees to automate security workflows without needing technical skills. Doing this enables software engineers to focus on mission-critical tasks, rather than mundane ones. Its customers include Coinbase, Box, Canva, Databricks, McKesson, and OpenTable.

Tines intends to double headcount from 18 people to support product growth in the coming months. It is opening a hub in Boston and intends to recruit across engineering, customer success and sales.

“If software is eating the world, automation is eating the enterprise. Yet, the majority of progress in this space still requires non-technical teams to depend on software engineers to implement their automation,” said Mr Hinchy.

“Other platforms are generally either too hard to use, not flexible enough or not sufficiently robust for mission-critical workflows like cybersecurity. Tines empowers enterprise teams to automate any of their own manual workloads independently, making their jobs more rewarding while simultaneously delivering enormous value for their organisations,” he added.

Mr Fixel left Tiger Global in early 2019 after more than a decade to launch Addition. Even after leaving Tiger he has continued to benefit from deals he led while with the VC, with recent exits including Peleton, Juul Labs and Flipkart as well as proceeds from IPOS involving Eventbrite, Tencent Music and SurveyMonkey.

“Tines has quickly established itself as a market leader in enterprise automation,” he said. We look forward to supporting Eoin and the Tines team as they continue to scale the business and enhance their product which is beloved by their unmatched customer base.”