From left: Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella. Image: Tines
With the latest round of funding, security automation start-up Tines will accelerate its expansion across Europe and the US.
Today (11 December), Dublin-based start-up Tines announced that it has raised $11m, just weeks after raising $4.1m. The latest batch of funding was led by Accel, with participation from Index Ventures and Blossom Capital.
This brings the total amount raised in Tines’ Series A round to $15.1m. The fresh funding will be used to further expansion into the US and Europe.
Tines, which was previously featured in our Start-up of the Week series, is a security automation firm that allows cybersecurity teams to automate their manual workloads.
The company has started building up its commercial and engineering teams, including in-house research and development programmes to ensure it can stay ahead of the ever-changing security landscape.
Accelerating expansion plans
Together, co-founders Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella have built a software platform that helps companies and enterprises automate their response to cyberattacks. It enables security analysts to automate repetitive, manual tasks without knowing how to code.
Following the company’s latest funding announcement, Hinchy said: “The interest we’ve had in Tines and our rate of adoption amongst the world’s leading security teams has surprised even us! Partnering with investors that have a global footprint allows us to accelerate our expansion plans across Europe and the US.”
Seth Pierrepont from Accel commented: “Having spent more than a decade as security operators, Eoin and Thomas have a deep understanding of and appreciation for the pain points that security teams are facing today.
“We believe automation has become a ‘must-have’ tool within enterprise security operations, and Tines’ easy to implement and customise approach positions it well to very quickly become a category leader.”
Shardul Shah of Index Ventures added: “We are delighted to support Eoin and Thomas. Their deep dedication to customers has enabled an outwardly simple solution to a complex set of problems. The need is consistent across every enterprise regardless of its sector, industry, location or language.”
What does Tines do?
Describing the aims of Tines, the company said: “The challenges security teams face today are well understood: understaffed teams, siloed tools and piecemeal processes. As a result, the speed at which teams can respond to security alerts has come under pressure.”
Tines aims to mitigate this by automatically gathering intelligence from disparate systems to enrich and triage alerts. Since the company was set up, less than a year ago, Tines has onboarded 10 major enterprise customers across a variety of industries.
These clients include McKesson, Auth0 and Box. According to Tines, these companies are automating an average of 100,000 actions per day.
Tristan Waldear, security automation manager at Box, said: “Automation has been a key part of Box’s cyber threat detection and response capabilities over the last few years.
“We chose Tines because it complements our existing environment perfectly – its intuitive automation story concept gives our incident responders desired control of workflow design, yet its flexibility allows us to seamlessly layer it on top of what we have already built.”
Flexibility
Unlike competitors in its field, Tines said that it doesn’t rely on pre-built integrations to interact with external systems. With competitor models, teams may be limited to a predefined number of integration options, primarily built by the vendor’s engineers.
If customers want to do anything beyond these steps, they need to ask the vendor to develop the integration for them, or redirect their internal engineers from higher-priority tasks – neither of which is ideal in the fast-paced security operations environment, according to the company.
Tines can be integrated with any tool that has an API, regardless of tool type. This means integration with commercial, off-the-shelf products or existing in-house tools, is designed to be quick and simple, with most security teams automating workflows within the first 24 hours.
The approach Tines has taken to automate security is quite flexible, the company added, which means that its use cases are not limited to security. Several of the start-up’s customers are using Tines in IT, DevOps and HR.
