In the technology sector, while artificial intelligence (AI) is often considered the term of the decade, the broader concept that might hold more significance is “resilience.” The readiness of individuals, organizations, and nations for unexpected negative developments across economic, geopolitical, social, and environmental fronts is a pressing issue, prompting a concerted search for answers.
This notion of resilience is also pertinent within the tech industry itself, as there is an increasing dependence on service availability, where downtime can indicate larger crises than mere disruptions in email communications.
Recognizing the market demand, the startup Incident.io has developed an AI-integrated platform designed to expedite incident management and response in today’s complex IT landscape. On Thursday, the London and San Francisco-based company announced it had secured $62 million in funding to support hiring, sales, and marketing efforts in both regions.
The Series B funding round is led by Insight Partners, with continued participation from previous investors Index and Point Nine. Incident.io’s total fundraising now exceeds $96 million, with this round following a $28.7 million Series A led by Index in July 2022.
Although the company did not disclose its valuation, sources indicate it is around $400 million, up from about $300 million approximately three years ago. Co-founders Stephen Whitworth (CEO), Pete Hamilton (CTO), and Chris Evans (CPO) established Incident.io after their experiences at fintech company Monzo. At Monzo, they developed systems to track service performance and facilitate better responses to issues, which inspired them to create a platform catering to a broader industry.
Incident.io’s motto, “Move fast when you break things,” reflects its approach to handling digital organizational challenges. The company’s platform is particularly beneficial for organizations with over 200 users, which equates to potentially thousands of employees using numerous apps, microservices, and functions essential for their operations.
Whitworth highlighted the potential for problems to arise in large organizations due to technical systems, people, or processes, during a 2022 interview with TechCrunch. Incident.io, over time, has expanded its client base, with companies like Netflix, Linear, Ramp, and Etsy among its users. A significant portion of its recent customer growth comes from the U.S., and the company has tripled its customer numbers in the past 12 months, powering responses for approximately 250,000 incidents since its founding in 2021.
Initially, Incident.io gained recognition through its interface on Slack, which primarily served tech companies. To appeal to other sectors, it expanded support to include Microsoft Teams and developed its own customized dashboard, providing comprehensive functionality and tracking for issue resolution while maintaining its presence in third-party chat applications.
Functionality advancements have been an important focus for Incident.io, with reliability and resilience as key use cases. While infrastructure teams typically adopt the platform, security teams have also begun using it. Even though Incident.io does not currently feature remediation or security-specific products, plans for these are in the pipeline, according to Whitworth.
In March, the startup introduced a product named On Call, competing with PagerDuty, to manage team member alerts during incident triaging. Currently, about 70% of Incident.io’s customers utilize this feature. The company aims to reduce fragmentation in IT by enhancing its incident response solutions.
More recently, Incident.io has started integrating AI across its platform. When incidents occur, teams often discuss them via Zoom calls, requiring someone to transcribe discussions and generate action items. Incident.io now provides an AI copilot to automate this task and interface with services like Datadog to understand code-related issues better. The company plans to develop these capabilities to support remediation.
The existing business model and future development plans have driven the recent investment. Thomas Krane, Managing Director at Insight Partners, commented on Incident.io’s innovation in modernizing and redefining incident response through AI, enhancing productivity and reducing downtime.
Additional notable investors in Incident.io include Instagram co-founder and Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger, as well as The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC.
