Incident.io looks to beef up its Slack-based incident response platform with $28.7M in fresh cash

According to Incident.io co-founder and CEO Stephen Whitworth, there is a lack of homogeneity in the market for software incident management solutions. He argues that engineering tools don't play well with governance, risk, and compliance platforms because they don't communicate with customer success tools.

Maybe there is something to the argument. According to a 2016 survey by Everbridge, nearly half of companies rely on manually calling and reaching out to people to respond to incidents. The average time to assemble a response team was shortened by half an hour.

I have experience handling incidents for complex and critical systems in multi-billion dollar companies and have witnessed the impact incidents can have on an organisation. They didn't have a solution to help them turn failure into a positive, either by speeding up response times to recover faster, or learning and becoming more resilient in the future.

As a data scientist, he co-launched the fraud prevention firm Ravelin Technology. Pete Hamilton and Chris Evans became the second and third co-founders of Incident.io after meeting Whitworth.

Evans came up with the idea for Incident.io after he built open source tooling to help incidents run more efficiently. The opportunity to provide something customers could buy off the shelf was spotted by us because other companies were either struggling with manual process or investing precious engineering time repeatedly building the same thing.

The image is from incident.io

Everything happens in slack with incident.io The incidents are announced in a channel and triggered by the workflows. Team members can use PagerDuty to assign roles and call in specialists, as well as share updates, set links, and update status pages from the channel. People who join the channel get a summary post and a button to subscribe to developments as they happen.

Many people don't sit in the same room together anymore, which makes coordination and communication harder They can see where the risk is.

Important changes to the channel timeline can be pinned on incident.io. Post-mortems can be exported to Jira in the form of follow-up actions.

There is more opportunity for things to go wrong with larger organizations. The man kept going. It is possible for the entire organisation to play on the same field if incident management is consolidated into one place.

There are a lot of competing products on the market. In March, Shoreline raised $35 million at an undisclosed valuation, while FireHydrant landed $23 million in a bid to accelerate its go-to- market efforts.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the global incident response services sector is expected to be worth as much as $10.13 billion by the end of the decade. Over 150 brands are included in the customer base of incident.io.

The image is from incident.io

In organizations with more than 200 people, the pain of coordinating across multiple teams in incidents is felt most acutely, and in organizations where there is regulation to navigate. There has been little impact so far from any budget reductions or cost-cutting measures.

The investors seem to think so. According to the company, it raised $28.7 million in a Series A round that included participation from Point Nine and the Chainsmokers. The total raised by Incident.io includes a previously-unannounced $5.5 million seed round.

The money will be put toward international expansion, specifically a first office in New York City, and the team in London. The startup has 29 employees and expects to have 50 by the end of the decade.

Expansion to the U.S., growing the team to satisfy product demand, and having a war chest during an economic downturn are some of the things that we wanted to be able to do. The demand for our services was growing so we raised this round.