incident.io raises $34.2m to help businesses build resilience in the face of failure
QUICK TAKE
- incident.io, the leading incident management platform for high-growth technology companies has announced $34.2m of new financing, including $28.7m in Series A led by Index Ventures.
- The funds will help power US expansion, talent acquisition and new functionality. A New York office is to open in July.
- Its platform and Slack integration provide a holistic all company approach to managing any issue from human error to tech failure.
- incident.io was developed by Stephen Whitworth, Pete Hamilton and Chris Evans, who met while working – and problem solving – at digital bank Monzo.
- With companies moving from a zero-incident strategy to building resilience, a growing number of customers are reliant on incident.io.
INDEX PERSPECTIVE
By Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, Partner
Stopping things going wrong is an impossible task. It’s something I experienced first-hand running operations and product at GoCardless and Skyscanner, which is why I was knocked back by the power of incident.io: having the system they’ve developed at hand would have been a game-changer.
Essentially, having a purely preventive approach to company incidents is like pushing a zero covid policy: it doesn’t work. Cases always get through, and all that’s achieved is long-lasting damage to the organisation. Instead, companies need the tools to deal with problems in real time, and learn from them. The focus must be on building resilience – something we see leadership teams and boards increasingly shifting their mindset towards.
That’s where incident.io comes in. The team have built a category defining product which takes the chaos, confusion and emotion out of dealing with incidents, enabling all the types of problems technology-powered companies can face to be effectively resolved, even when the stakes are high.
And their users are obsessed: I’ve spoken to many in recent months that couldn’t speak more highly of the product, the team and their vision. It’s just one of the reasons we believe that incident.io have the tech, the people, the ambition and the rigor to not only create a new category, but to dominate it.
THE DETAILS
Whether companies are dealing with website outages, data breaches, human error, overwhelmed support teams or payment failures, incidents happen all the time.
Yet until now, there have been no consolidated incident management products available, leaving many to rely on frenzied discussions or automations that have been patched together using generic workflow tools. Confusion and panic often reign.
incident.io is plugging this gap. Using its platform and Slack integration, companies can apply a holistic, systematic all company approach to reporting, managing and learning from issues in real time. The senior team meanwhile get a record of everything that has gone wrong, and how it was dealt with.
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How incident.io enables companies to manage issues
- Sensible ‘default’ solutions to incidents – such sending an update to customers or assigning team members to play specific roles.
- A powerful ‘virtual war room’ for running an incident directly within Slack.
- incident.io can encode and automate key workflows and process, making it easy to do the right thing.
- When the incident is over, the process of debriefing and learning from issues, is streamlined, with insights and improvements extracting through automatically collected data.
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Alongside Loom, over 150 companies across the world now use incident.io including Vanta, Trainline and dbt Labs. And with the announcement of $34.2m of funding – including $28.7m in Series A financing and a previously unannounced $5.5m round closed earlier in the year – the ambitious team have big plans.
“It's in the whole organisation. It’s used across all of engineering, and is the source of truth for product, business and marketing partners as well,” explains Vinay Hiremath, CTO of Loom, an incident.io customer.
The company’s first US office is to open in New York in July 2022 (50% of incident.io customers are already in the US) while the London office will be expanded with new hires. On the product side, the team say it will enable the roll out of new features to be accelerated.
As well as Index Ventures, existing investor Point Nine participated in the Series A round alongside new investors, including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Lachy Groom and The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC.
Published — July 13, 2022
