In the world of technology, some may argue that a decade-long period is AI, but beyond this single sector, in a larger scheme of things, the most important term may be “resilience.” How prepared are people, organizations and countries for unexpected, negative economic, geopolitical, social and environmental development? This is a question that causes many scramblings in search of answers.
This existential crisis is unfolding in the world of technology as well. We are more dependent on us than ever – uptime, or in other words, downtime, may speak to a greater crisis than your emails don’t send.
On Thursday, seizing that demand in the market, the startup incident of the same name announced its $62 million funding by creating an all-in-one, AI-based platform to speed up incident management and response in a fragmented world.
Inciss.io is based in London and also operates in San Francisco, and plans to use new money for employment, sales and marketing in both regions.
Insight Partners led Series B in the previous backer index, with Point Nine also taking part. (The Index led the startup’s $28.7 million Series A in July 2022.) In this latest round, Incide.io has now slightly increased its $96 million.
The startup has not disclosed its valuation, but it says that the sources close to the deal are in the $400 million region. Incide.io was valued at around $300 million about three years ago, sources say.
Stephen Whitworth (CEO), Pete Hamilton (CTO) and Chris Evans (CPO) co-founded Inciss.io after working together at Fintech Monzo. So, three built a pipeline from scratch, based on open source touring, tracking the performance of the company’s internal and customer service, helping Monzo respond better when something went wrong.
They could see that the point of problem for identifying and tracking various incidents resembles the digital organizations facing other digital organizations, and decided to attack on their own to build a platform to address them for the wider industry.
“Move fast when you break things” is the motto that is the tongue of the company, and it is the right motto for any organization.
These days, very small businesses use a wide range of digital tools across different architectures, and even incremental updates across one of these tools can trigger glitches that remove the entire system.
Incide.io’s sweet spot is an organization of over 200 users and usually works with thousands of employees overall. Plus, of course, potentially dozens or hundreds of different apps, microservices, and other features that connect their work with those employees.
“The bigger the organization, the more opportunities there are, whether it’s a technical system, a person, or a process, that can lead to things not going well,” Whitworth told TechCrunch in a 2022 interview.
Inciss.io has grown significantly over the years. Netflix, Linear, Ramp and Etsy are one of their current customers. Whitworth told TechCrunch that about three-quarters of its clients are in the US, and that its customer base has tripled over the past 12 months. He also said the incident has been powered by responses and alerts for around 250,000 incidents since it was founded in 2021.
The startup has also expanded its offerings. Isscive.io originally created its own name by building a major user interface in Slack. It was “a great place to start, but mostly distorted by high-tech companies,” Whitworth said. So, we’ve also added support for Microsoft’s team and its own customized dashboard, “Chat Brethren” as the company aims to grow and target other sectors.
The dashboard has the most features and tracking for resolution and more, but Incide.io always maintains a presence in third-party chat apps, Whitworth said. “When things don’t go well, people jump into the chat more,” he said.
The company is also evolving its products in terms of functionality. “Reliability and Resilience” remains a major use case for Incision.io, and typically the infrastructure team incorporates the product and is used by engineers or data specialists. Recently, Incisio.io has also seen an influx of security teams adopting it. (Incide.io currently has no repairs or other security products, and it is not specifically integrated with them. There are plans for both futures, Whitworth said.)
The startup added a product called in March to manage how to alert team members during the incident triage. It directly competes with Pagerduty. About 70% of incident customers currently use it, Whitworth said. There is a debate that there is less fragmentation at all levels of IT, and Incide.io is fighting for the company to do it here in incident response.
Recently, Inciss.io has begun weaving more AI across the platform. It does this in several areas.
Usually, as an incident starts to unfold, many people “jump to the Zoom Call and discuss it,” Whitworth said, leaving behind “poor man” to transcribe it and come up with action items. The company now offers AI “copilot” to handle that work, and submits requests to services like Datadog to better understand what’s going on in the code.
Over time, the idea is to enhance the work and extend it to repair.
The existing business and future roadmap came to this latest Inciss.io.
“Inciss.io builds the products that engineers rely on to minimize downtime and maximize productivity by their organizations,” Insight Partners Managing Director Thomas Krane said in a statement. “By pioneering AI agents working with engineers to resolve incidents, they are not just modernizing incident response, they are reinventing it for a world where AI continues to run it, rather than simply writing code.”
Other well-known investors at Incide.io include Instagram co-founders and human CPO Mike Krieger and Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC.