Incident.io Secures $62M to Revolutionize IT Incident Management with AI

Incident.io raises $62M at a $400M valuation to help IT teams move fast when things break | TechCrunch

In the world of tech, some might argue that the term of the decade is AI, but in the bigger scheme of things beyond this single sector, the most important word may well be "resilience." How well prepared are people, organizations and countries for unforeseen, negative economic, geopolitical, social and environmental developmen? It's a question that's trigging a lot of scrambling in search of answers. The existential crisis that is resilience is also playing out in the world of tech. We're more reliant than ever before on uptime, and downtime may speak to bigger crises than your email not sending. Seizing on that demand in the market, today, the eponymous startup Incident.io, which has built an all-in-one, AI-based platform to help speed up incident management and response in the fragmented world of IT, is announcing $62 million in funding. Incident.io is based in London with operations also in San Francisco, and it plans to use the funding for hiring, sales and marketing across both regions. Insight Partners is leading the Series B with previous backers Index and Point Nine also participating. (Index led the startup's $28.7 million Series A in July 2022). With this latest round, the company has now raised just over $96 million. The startup is not disclosing valuation, but sources close to the deal tell me it's in the region of $400 million. The company had a valuation of around $300 million at Series A, the sources say. Other high-profile investors in the startup include Mike Krieger and The Chainsmokers' Mantis VC. Stephen Whitworth (CEO) Pete (CTO) and Chris Evans (CPO) co-founded incident.io after working together at fintech Monzo. There the three helped build pipelines from the ground up, based on open-source tooling, to track the performance of the company's internal and customer-facing services and to help Monzo better respond when something went wrong. They could see that their pain points for identifying and tracking different incidents were similar to those other digital organisations faced, and they decided to strike out on their own to build a platform to address that for the wider industry. "Move fast when you break things," is the company's tongue-in-cheek motto, and it's an apt one for any organization. These days, the smallest businesses use a wide array of digital tools across a variety of architectures, and even an incremental update across any one of these tools can trigger glitches that take down entire systems. Incident.io's sweet spot is organizations of users numbering more than 200 people, which typically works out to many thousands of employees overall, plus of course potentially dozens or hundreds of different apps, microservices and other functions that bind those employees and their work together. "The larger the organization, the more opportunity there is for things to go wrong, whether that's with technical systems, people, or processes." Whitworth told us in 2022. Incident.io has grown substantially over the years. Netflix, Linear, Ramp, and Etsy are among its current customers. Whitworth said in an interview with TechCrunch that about three-quarters of the customers it's adding are in the U.S., and it's tripled its customer base in the last 12 months. The startup says that it has powered responses and alerts for some 250,000 incidents since it was founded in 2021. It has also expanded as a product. Incident.io originally made a name for itself by building its primary user interface in Slack. This, Whitworth said, "was a great place to start, but Slack skews to mostly tech companies," so as the company has grown and aimed to target other sectors, it's also added support for Microsoft's Teams as well as its own customised dashboard, "a compatriot to chat," he said. That dashboard will have the most functionality and tracking for resolutions and more, but the startup will always keep a presence in third-party chat apps, Whitworth said. "When things go wrong people jump into chat, even more and more now." The company has also evolved the product in terms of functionality. "Reliability and resilience" are still the primary use cases for Incident.io, and typically infrastructure teams will bring the product in and it will be used by engineers or data specialists. More recently, it's also seeing an influx from security teams adopting it, too. (Incident.io does not currently have any remediation or other security products, nor does it specifically integrate with them: there are plans for both in the future, Whitworth said.) More recently, Incident.io has also started to weave more AI throughout the platform. It's doing this in a few areas. Typically, when an incident starts to unfold, many will "jump on a Zoom call to discuss it", Whitworth said, leaving "a poor human" to transcribe that and come up with action items. The company is now offering an AI copilot to handle that work as well as send out requests to services like Datadog to better understand what might be happening with the code. Over time, the idea will be to enhance that work to extend as far as remediation. The existing business, plus the roadmap ahead, is what's brought about this latest investment. "Incident.io is building a product that engineers love and organizations rely on to minimize downtime and maximize productivity," said Thomas Krane, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. "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."

Incident.io raises $62M to build AI agents for incident response - SiliconANGLE

Incident.io raises $62M to build AI agents for incident response Incident.io, a startup that provides an artificial intelligence-driven platform to speed up the response and management to incidents such as application outages, said today it has raised $62 million in a Series B funding round. Insight Partners led the round with support from existing investors Index Ventures and Point Nine Capital. This funding brings the total raised by the company to over $96 million following the company's $28.7 million Series A in 2022. Founded in 2021 out of a former London fire station, Incident.io Chief Executive Stephen Whitworth said the company saw most incident management teams were working with fragmented tools such as PagerDuty and a home-brew mix of spreadsheets and ticketing systems to get the job done. This was causing a level of chaos in the industry he thought that his company could solve. "Fast forward to now, and over 250,000 incidents later, we've become the default choice for elite engineering teams moving away from outdated tools," said Whitworth. The company's incident management product started in Slack, the cloud-based messaging application for business communication and collaboration, but has since integrated into Microsoft Teams. Since its launch, Incident.io has brought on hundreds of engineering teams, including those within major tech companies including Netflix Inc., Airbnb Inc. and OpenAI. In March 2024, the company launched On-call, an AI-powered product that helps get the right people notified at the right time, making sleepless nights for incident management teams less disruptive. It provides a single place for all alerts and allows escalation to the appropriate people so that on-call members get them at the right time and scheduling so that nobody is left out. It's the company's third product after Response, which helps with coordination and communication and Status Pages, which keep internal management and external customers up to date. In recent years, a whole new challenge has emerged: AI-generated code. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei commented that he expects that 90% of code will be written with the assistance of AI by the end of the year. This has led to shorter development times, meaning that software engineers are shipping applications and features faster than ever. At the same time, AI code assistance has led to a spike in complexity which means debugging and testing can lead to issues going into production with a high probability. In turn, this will turn into incidents in production with application failures, performance issues and other problems at 3 a.m. with trickier problems to resolve. Whitworth said as AI is causing these problems, it must also be the solution. "This year, we're pushing our functionality to include AI agents to investigate incidents with you," he said. "We show you what's wrong, why it's wrong, and ensure engineers can get to the root cause an order of magnitude faster." The company's vision isn't to replace site reliability engineers or incident teams, Whitworth said, but to augment them with a powerful AI partner. It will help free them from the tedious work of researching root causes and other critical insights when approaching incident response even before they get to their keyboards. "So teams can significantly reduce downtime and get high-quality engineering time back," Whitworth explained. With the new funds, Whitworth said, Incident.io intends to accelerate its current AI vision for incident response by hiring more engineers and crafting more products for its growing customer base. It also intends to expand its sales, customer success and marketing teams to support the current growth.

Incident.io's AI agents just got $62M to investigate your outages

Incident.io, which builds AI tools to manage problems like app outages, secured $62 million in Series B funding led by Insight Partners. This follows a $28.7 million Series A in 2022, bringing total funding over $96 million for the London-based startup. Founded in 2021 by CEO Stephen Whitworth, Incident.io aimed to consolidate the fragmented tools-like PagerDuty, spreadsheets, and ticketing systems-often used for incident management. Whitworth noted this mix created chaos, an issue his company set out to resolve. "Fast forward to now, and over 250,000 incidents later, we've become the default choice for elite engineering teams moving away from outdated tools," Whitworth stated. The company counts engineering teams at Netflix Inc., Airbnb Inc., and OpenAI among its clients. Initially launched on Slack, the incident management product now integrates with Microsoft Teams. Incident.io offers three core products. Response focuses on coordination and communication during incidents. Status Pages keeps internal teams and external customers informed. Its newest product, On-call, launched in March 2024. On-call uses AI to manage alerts, ensuring the right personnel are notified efficiently and improving scheduling to minimize disruption for on-call teams. IBM's latest mainframe knows AI will change everything Incident.io is now tackling complexity driven by AI-generated code. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts AI assistance will feature in 90% of code writing by year-end, accelerating development but also increasing the likelihood of complex production issues. Whitworth argues AI must also be part of the solution. "This year, we're pushing our functionality to include AI agents to investigate incidents with you," he said. "We show you what's wrong, why it's wrong, and ensure engineers can get to the root cause an order of magnitude faster." The company emphasizes augmenting, not replacing, site reliability engineers. Whitworth envisions AI partners freeing engineers from tedious research before they even start investigating, helping them identify root causes and gain critical insights more quickly. "So teams can significantly reduce downtime and get high-quality engineering time back," Whitworth explained. The new $62 million investment will fuel Incident.io's AI development, including hiring more engineers and building new products. Funds will also support expanding its sales, customer success, and marketing teams to manage growth.