Tines cofounder Eoin Hinchy is very clear about the opportunity that its most recent fundraising has brought to the company.
“We felt like it was the time to strike and go and capture as much of this market as we can.”
The workflow automation company recently announced it had raised $125 million in a Series C financing round led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, bringing in new investors SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Activant. Existing investors Accel, Felicis, CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and Addition also took part.
The company has now raised $272 million in funding, $175 million of that in under a year, when the current round is taken into account.
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Hinchy said the company would likely have planned a fundraising for 2025 anyway although it had yet to put a timeline on it. Then came the Goldman opportunity.
“It’s not even nine months since we did our last fundraise and we were in a very fortunate position that we didn’t really need to do this one,” he says. “But when an investor of Goldman’s calibre comes along, you take that opportunity and you run with it as fast as you can.”
Tines has been building its business solidly since it was founded by Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella in 2018.
The company develops software to help workers automate security workflows quickly, easily and without the need for advanced technical skills. That frees up software engineers to focus on more critical tasks, rather than getting bogged down in mundane ones.
[ Tines tops LinkedIn list of Irish start-upsOpens in new window ]
By 2022, the company had raised $96 million, including a $55 million round in October of that year. Among its customers were Coinbase, McKesson, Canva, Databricks, MongoDB, Sophos, Kayak, and Fenergo.
That was before the beginning of the great generative AI push that propelled ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini into the spotlight. Now Tines is riding the wave of interest in AI-powered technology.
But Hinchy says its core focus has never changed, despite the surge of AI.
“There are some macro tailwinds that we have been very fortunate to find ourselves in front of,” he says. “But our mission has always been to power the world’s most important workflows. That has been it from day one, and that’s not going to change.
“What is interesting is that the mission has genuinely never been more important. We went from our workflow automation being an important part of everyone’s technology stack to, with AI and large language models (LLMs) coming on the scene, becoming the most important technology decision that companies are making as part of their enterprise strategies.”
Despite the rapidly shifting tech landscape, one thing hasn’t changed: companies want value for their investment.
All of this has benefited Tines. The Irish company was being touted last year as a “soonicorn”, a company that would soon reach the magic $1 billion valuation. Only a small number of Irish companies have reached that status in the past few years, companies like LetsGetChecked, Wayflyer, Flipdish and Fenergo.
There was a time a couple of years ago where it was growth at all costs. I think now the real value comes from balancing growth with efficiency
— Eoin Hinchy
The latest funding round tips Tines into full unicorn status, with a $1.1 billion valuation. It is a label Hinchy says Tines will wear with pride, especially given a decline in valuations in the tech sector in recent years.
“I think the 2020/21 landscape for funding was a little bit different,” he says. “It feels a little bit more meaningful, I would say, in the last couple of years, just given how difficult fundraising has been.”
There are big plans for the money, including research and development to further develop its products. One of the beneficiaries is likely to be Workbench, an AI chat tool that Tines unveiled last year to help security teams use large language models securely on proprietary data. The demand for that has how outstripped what Tines expected, Hinchy says, with large enterprises investing in it.
That is a trend that Tines has seen throughout its business. Overall, the use of its technology has grown rapidly in the past year. Automated actions within its platform have tripled in the past year, a growth rate it expects to accelerate as more large companies come on board.
To deal with this surge in demand, there are also plans to expand the workforce, adding around 100 people across all departments, from engineering to more general roles. Tines currently employs around 250 people; in March 2020, when Covid hit, it had only five staff.
[ Irish cybersecurity automation company Tines raises $55mOpens in new window ]
It has offices in Boston, San Francisco, Dublin and Australia, all of which will benefit from further investment in the near future.
“We’re not going to go crazy,” Hinchy says. “There was a time a couple of years ago where it was growth at all costs. I think now the real value comes from balancing growth with efficiency. You won’t see us doing any crazy investment.”
The AI landscape may be new to most people but it is already starting to evolve. The most recent development, the launch of Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s AI model, sent a shock wave through the industry when it was claimed the company had developed its technology on a much tighter budget than its rivals. There was a sudden falter in the market
Tines has the advantage of being agnostic when it comes to AI. Its tools are designed to work across multiple providers, rather than going all-in with one technology company.
The advent of DeepSeek and the potential the Chinese start-up could bring to the market has not been lost on Hinchy.
“I think it will have a monumental impact,” he says. “As these large language models become faster and cheaper, we’ll definitely see an impact on valuations, of course you will. But I think it’s a good thing for consumers and businesses.”
For Tines, the increased competition is also good. Customers can pick which model they want to use in different use cases – a large parameter model that is expensive to train but very accurate for some work, a cheaper model for high volume work that does not require the same depth of thought or consideration.
“The models will get cheaper, they will get faster, they will get more commoditised, but the value that we add is how we connect those models, regardless of what the model is, to your real time and proprietary data,” explains Hinchy.
[ Helping companies work with AI while keeping their corporate data safeOpens in new window ]
“We’re a little bit insulated from this, and essentially we allow our customers to choose the model that’s best for them and their use cases. It’s indicative, I think, that a lot of the value companies are going to get from AI isn’t necessarily from the foundational model themselves but more from the applications that are leveraging those models.”
The technology has also allowed Tines to speed up its own development, with Hinchy saying that generative AI in particular has helped accelerate the company’s growth.
“We make it easy for frontline staff to automate the repetitive parts of their jobs without having to write code, and we spend a lot of time building software that would make it easy to essentially have the same output as a software engineer without having to know how to write code,” he explains. “It allowed us to skip maybe one, two, three years, potentially, of iterative development, just because this technology has allowed us to accelerate.”
Balancing those benefits with security concerns is something that the industry has been trying to do for some time. The use of generative AI in companies has been a subject of much debate since the technology began to gain traction, with concerns over data security and control among the most pressing.
[ Rapid growth of AI poses ‘profound’ threat to privacyOpens in new window ]
Tines is keen to emphasise its security credentials. For a company that was started by cybersecurity experts, getting it right was crucial.
“How do we use this technology in a way that isn’t going to terrify our customers and lead to some sort of data sensitivity problems?” Hinchy says. “We had to spend a lot of time building the infrastructure and technology that would allow our customers, who are obviously extremely security conscious, run the technology in a way that was safe, secure, compliant, and had the kind of enterprise governance guardrails you would expect.”
With the latest fundraising under its belt, Tines isn’t seeking any more financial backing. For now, the focus will be on building the products and making them more powerful.
“I think our balance sheet is certainly sufficient for what we plan to do for the next two or three years. But if you’d asked me that exact same question two or three years ago, I would have said the same thing,” says Hinchy. “I think if we continue to see the level of traction and growth within the product, we’ll re-evaluate then.”
