incident.io Raises $62M to Accelerate Incident Response

The Growing Importance of Resilience in a Tech-Driven World

While artificial intelligence often dominates tech conversations, a potentially more crucial concept is gaining prominence: resilience. The ability of individuals, businesses, and nations to withstand unforeseen economic, geopolitical, social, and environmental challenges is becoming increasingly vital. This has sparked a widespread search for effective solutions.

Tech's Reliance on Uptime and the Rise of Incident Management

This need for preparedness extends directly into the technology sector. Modern life is heavily dependent on consistent service availability – often referred to as uptime. Service disruptions, or downtime, can signal larger systemic issues beyond a simple inability to send an email.

Responding to this growing demand, Incident.io, a startup specializing in AI-powered incident management, announced $62 million in new funding on Thursday. The company provides an all-in-one platform designed to accelerate incident response within the often-fragmented landscape of IT operations.

Funding and Expansion Plans

Incident.io, with headquarters in London and a presence in San Francisco, intends to allocate the new capital towards expanding its teams, bolstering sales efforts, and enhancing marketing initiatives across both regions.

Insight Partners led the Series B funding round, with participation from existing investors Index and Point Nine. Index previously spearheaded the startup’s $28.7 million Series A funding in July 2022. This latest investment brings Incident.io’s total funding to just over $96 million.

Although the company has not publicly disclosed its valuation, sources familiar with the deal estimate it to be approximately $400 million. This represents a significant increase from a valuation of around $300 million roughly three years prior.

From Fintech Roots to a Dedicated Incident Management Platform

Incident.io was co-founded by Stephen Whitworth (CEO), Pete Hamilton (CTO), and Chris Evans (CPO). The founders previously collaborated at fintech company Monzo, where they developed robust systems for monitoring internal and customer-facing services and improving incident response using open-source tools.

Recognizing the widespread applicability of their solutions, they established Incident.io to address the incident management challenges faced by a broader range of digital organizations.

The company’s motto, “Move fast when you break things,” reflects the realities of modern software development and deployment.

Addressing the Complexity of Modern IT Infrastructure

Even small businesses now utilize a complex array of digital tools and architectures. A minor update to any one of these tools can potentially disrupt entire systems.

Incident.io primarily targets organizations with over 200 users, which typically translates to thousands of employees and numerous interconnected applications, microservices, and other essential functions.

As Whitworth explained in a 2022 interview, “The larger the organization, the more opportunity there is for things to go wrong, whether that’s with technical systems, people, or processes.”

Growth and Notable Clients

Incident.io has experienced substantial growth in recent years. Its customer base includes prominent companies such as Netflix, Linear, Ramp, and Etsy.

Whitworth reported that approximately three-quarters of new clients are based in the U.S., and the company has tripled its customer base in the last 12 months. Since its founding in 2021, Incident.io has facilitated responses to around 250,000 incidents.

Expanding Product Offerings and Integrations

The company has broadened its product suite beyond its initial Slack-based interface. While Slack provided a valuable starting point, Whitworth noted its skew towards tech companies. To reach a wider audience, Incident.io has added support for Microsoft Teams and a standalone customized dashboard.

The dashboard offers enhanced functionality and tracking capabilities, while Incident.io maintains a presence within popular chat applications, recognizing that “When things go wrong, people jump into chat, even more and more now.”

Evolving Use Cases and Expanding Team Focus

Initially focused on infrastructure teams and reliability/resilience use cases, Incident.io has also seen increasing adoption by security teams. While the platform currently lacks dedicated remediation or security products, future integration plans are underway.

In March, the company launched On Call, a product designed to streamline the process of alerting team members during incident triage. This directly competes with PagerDuty, and is currently used by 70% of Incident.io’s customers.

The Integration of Artificial Intelligence

Incident.io is actively integrating AI throughout its platform to further enhance incident response capabilities.

For example, the company now offers an AI “copilot” to automatically transcribe Zoom calls during incident unfolding and generate action items. This copilot can also query services like Datadog to gain deeper insights into potential code-related issues.

The long-term vision is to extend AI’s role to include automated remediation efforts.

Investment Rationale and Future Outlook

This latest investment reflects confidence in Incident.io’s existing business and its future roadmap.

Thomas Krane, managing director at Insight Partners, stated, “Incident.io is building a product that engineers love and organizations rely on to minimize downtime and maximize productivity. By pioneering AI agents that collaborate with engineers to resolve incidents, they’re not just modernizing incident response but reinventing it for a world where AI isn’t just writing code; it’s keeping it running.”

Other notable investors include Instagram co-founder and Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger, and Mantis VC, the venture fund associated with The Chainsmokers.