AI Action and Automatic Transformation with Tines’ Eoin Hinchy

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here on our techron TV broadcast for today.

Our next guest is Owen Hinchey. Owen is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Tines. You know, you probably haven't heard of Tines yet, and that's okay.

We're here to tell you about it and let you learn a little bit. They've got some news coming out as well. But first, let's, let's welcome Owen.

Owen, welcome to Techstrong tv. It's great to have you on here, Alan. Thank you so much for having me, man.

It's great to be here. Good, our pleasure. So, Owen, you're CEO and co-Founder of Times and Correct, you know, we were talking off camera.

You gotta be a little bit crazy at some level too, to just take this on. Right. Because it's, it's a lot to do to found a company and, and, you know, first start bootstrapping, raising money, building something you've gotta be, I'm always reminded of the old movie, like, uh, close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I don't know if you saw that ever. Uh, but Richard Dreyfus is just driven. He has this vision of what's become, it was devil's, uh, mountain or whatever, and he, he sees it everywhere.

He has to build it, and it's just, it's his passion. Talk to us a little bit about your background and your passion that led to the co-founding Tides. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a fun place to start.

So I, I think, I think it's, um, it's understandable for people to like found in the first company. The thing that always blows my mind is people who go again, uh, because it's, it's like you have this kind of sense of almost blissful ignorance when you found a company Exactly. Second time, you're a glutton for one.

Yeah. You, you had no excuse, you know, all that horrible things that you're gonna have to deal with, uh, the, the second time round. Um, you know, you know, my story is, is, is fairly simple.

I think Alan, honestly, uh, I'm a first time founder. I'm a first time entrepreneur. I, I genuinely never had any grand ambitions of founding a company or co-founding a company.

I wasn't, I wasn't your kind of like, typical childhood entrepreneur who had like a, a paper round or a lemonade stand. Mm-Hmm. I, I've spent the, I spent the vast majority of my career as a, um, a kind of technical practitioner.

So my, my background is in software engineering, and I spent a lot of my career helping to build and run cybersecurity teams for companies like eBay, PayPal, and DocuSign, uh, here in Dublin, where I've been born and raised, and also in the US for, for a little while as well. But the, the inspiration for, for Times came in about 2017 when I was working in DocuSign and was responsible for a bunch of cybersecurity teams in, in that company. And we desperately needed an automation platform to allow the teams that reported to me automate the repetitive parts of their jobs without needing to be professional software engineers.

And we spent a bunch of time trying to find a tool or a product that we could buy off the shelf and just roll out across the teams, but we couldn't find anything that came close to meeting our requirements. And we spent months looking for various products. And so I found at times, really out of frustration with the products that were available on the market.

So I, I didn't have this kind of like huge ambition or, um, or Richard Dreyfus kind of like obsession to go and solve something. What I wanted to do was build a product for my friends and people that I'd known, and all the folks i, I have worked with over the years that would make their jobs easier and more fun and more enjoyable. Um, and here we are now, six years later, the company is about 200 people.

We've got offices in Dublin, Boston, San Francisco, and a presence in Australia as well. We've kind of quickly established ourselves as the leader in no-code automation across, uh, mission critical teams. We've raised like $150 million.

And, um, at no point when I founded the company had I kind of like imagined that level of success or even frankly, dreamed of that level of success. Yeah. Hey, Neil, first of all, congratulations.

Thank you. Right. Thank you, man.

That means a lot. So, I, I I, I have done the co-founding thing now four times and founded Tech Trunk, though Textron would never, um, venture backed, it was bootstrap, bootstrapped this. And, um, as you said, it, it, I, I didn't go into it with grandiose dreams either.

I, I went into it because I was just, it was so, it was fun. Yeah. It was like, it was things that I was working on and it was kind of a very much a natural progression.

This was early in the internet, right? I started, I thought I was a digital landlord, but it became called web hosting, right? And, and then from there into infrastructure and then from there into cyber.

I founded a cyber company. Co-founded a cyber company in 2001. Um, did that for a while and that was Grand Adventure.

But I mean, this is tremendous amount of success. And you know, when you look at low-code, no-code, we've been following the low-code, no-code market here for a number of years. I, I gotta be honest with you, the whole AI impact specifically on no-code, I guess I should have seen it coming, but I did it, which is why I'm still sitting here and I'm founding another company, I guess.

But I didn't see it coming. And it's having a, a profound impact because I, you know, for a long time, Owen, in the first couple years, it was like CICD, you never say CI without cd. It was the same thing with low code, no code.

You never said no code without low code. Yeah. But now with AI specifically, I really think we're seeing the division there is low code, right?

Mm-Hmm. There's low code, but no code is its own cat, its own species, it's own thing. And AI is really accelerating, uh, how people are using this to build incredible things without, without being a coder.

Totally. Um, you guys recently announced a, a, a big series B of funding you mentioned, uh, well you didn't mention, but I'm gonna ask you about it right now. Yeah.

And also a lot of, some, uh, a new general availability launch of an AI feature. We we're gonna talk about both those things. Let's do the funding round and get that out of the way, and then we'll jump into the AI stuff.

Yeah, I, I guess our, our, our story is somewhat unique, uh, and against the trend in that our, uh, fundraise and our AI announcements are completely separate. Mm-Hmm. And so we mm-Hmm.

We, it didn't raise the capital because we had AI funding and, and, and, uh, we didn't raise the capital to go and like build AI products. So we, um, we have always been very flexible around, um, the technology that we use to underpin how tines works. So essentially for folks that don't know, we're, we're watching this, uh, we provide a platform that allows companies to build, run, and monitor any important workflow.

Um, and we started as a, a kind of very niche, uh, security operation center automation product that was very specific to, um, cybersecurity teams, automation needs. But the way we built the product, it was designed in such a way that it would allow anyone to automate any process. We were completely stack agnostic and, uh, we didn't really care what the use cases were that our customers were automating.

And so over the years, um, we've seen the product expand from these kind of very niche cybersecurity use cases into broad applicability across any mission critical team. And now we have folks using the product in IT and engineering and infrastructure and so on. And so the fundraising really came about, um, when, earlier on this year we, um, we were on the back of a bunch of really successful momentum across a number of like financial quarters.

And we are beating our biggest deal records, uh, quarter in and quarter out. But when you're the CEO, and as you know, when you have that kind of momentum, you really wanna do everything possible to cling to that momentum for as long as possible and ride that wave. And, and one of the ways you do that is by minimizing any kind of external distractions.

And so we had, um, set ourselves the non goal earlier on this year is of raising capital. We were also very fortunate in that we already had a strong balance sheet, and so it didn't really need to raise this year. And so we were, we had all agreed internally, look, we're not gonna fundraise.

Let's focus on the business. We've got this amazing momentum. We've got a lot of AI capabilities that we're working on.

Let's stay heads down. And we've got a bunch of very passionate, enthusiastic support of existing investors who approached us and said, listen, we completely agree. The thing to do here is to like, keep this momentum going.

But when you have this level of traction and when you're, um, succeeding the way that you guys are succeeding, you really wanna step on the gas. There's, there's times when you wanna step on the brakes and there's times you wanna step on the gas and our investors will like, now is the time to step on the gas. And so they were very supportive in that they suggested, why don't we just do an internal round with all our existing investors, raise some capital, keep things, um, very simple and easy and quick.

And that way we get the best of boat worlds. We can raise the capital to invest in areas where we're seeing outsized traction, but we get to minimize distraction and continue to focus on the business, the product and our customers. And so we, we kind of struck this Goldilocks scenario where we were able to raise the capital in a time when raising capital is not trivial.

And we were able to do it in such a way that didn't jeopardize the momentum and allowed us to keep focused on the things that we were, that we were doing really well. Great. If you don't mind asking it, I'm assuming it's public.

How big a series B did you raise? So we, this was actually an extension of our series B. So we, we raised our series B um, last year or the year before.

I can't actually remember exactly when, but we had, we had raised the capital at our series B, and this was an extension of our Series B. So because it was all our existing investors and the same paperwork in the same terms, we raised an additional 50,000,005 zero from aerospace investors'. Sure.

Yeah. It, it, it is, you know, and I think what's, Especially in this, in this environment, I mean, that's a big vote of confidence there. Yeah.

I, I, you know, I, I think so, and I, I'd love to say that, you know, it, it's some masterclass by me as the CEO, but one of the jokes I I, I'd make ad nauseum internally at times is that I think CEO stands for credit enjoyment officer. 'cause all I do is take the credit from everybody else's hard work. I I used to have people tell me that too.

They'd say, yeah, used to come in to kiss the babies and shake hands, take the photo. You know, I know what leak is and their babies. Yeah, That's exactly right.

We all have a job to do. Um, alright, let's quickly turn over to a AI though. Yeah.

So, you know, I, I think you've, you've kind of touched on this a couple of points over the, over the last few minutes in that, um, there's, there's kind of an, I'm paraphrasing, there's kind of a few extraordinarily exciting use cases for gen ai, right? And one of them is writing code. I, I think it's what gen AI is honestly best at.

Um, and as a no-code, low-code platform, when we saw the emergence, uh, of LLMs and Genis in the last kinda like two years or so, we were super excited by what it had the potential to do for our product and for our customers. Because again, we've always been super flexible, uh, towards the technologies that underpin the product. But it took us, Alan, no joke, probably about 70 failed experiments to come up with a, um, an approach and an application of these technologies that we felt actually made sense for us and our customers.

'cause I think there was a lot of, there was a lot of buzz and snake oil around these technologies in the last 18 months. And a lot of the products that we saw released were completely underwhelming and felt both bolted onto the side and didn't actually solve any real problems. And so we wanted to take our time and make sure that we had a solution that we felt was value add.

And so what we, what we've ended up launching in the last little while is kind of two products really. One is a usage of gen AI that allows our customers to build better workflows. So by providing kind of natural language prompts, it allows our customers to do all the hard parts of workflow automation, like data manipulation, our transformation of data.

And so our customers can simply de describe what it is they want to do. And then tying users, gen, AI to go and build the workflow and the actions that are required to do what they want to do, essentially without our customers needing to understand all these kind of niche, gnarly problems like how to write Python and Reg X is, and dependencies and so on. So the first AI technology was this ability to build better workflows.

And then the second technology is something that allows our customers to run better workflows. And we think this is kind of the, the more exciting of the two products, honestly. And essentially what it does is it allows our customers to access LLMs, the raw LLMs, the foundational models in a secure and private way at any point in their workflow.

So a customer can take, um, an AI action as we call it, and drop it into their workflow at any point, allowing them to then use an LLM to make their workflows better, to allow them to recommend next steps, take action, manipulate things, um, and essentially just make the workflow more powerful, um, easier to understand and allow it to do a much more diverse set of, um, little more diverse set of stack than it's ever been able to do before. So it's been super fun to kind of watch our customers use these technologies. Absolutely.

Very cool. Um, and this is, this was released earlier this month into general availability? Yes, Correct.

So we released it a, um, a, a few weeks ago now, but it's been in the hands of some of our customers for a long time, uh, who've been testing it, designing it with us, working on it, et cetera. So when they've launched, um, they were really kind of battle hardened and, um, we're already being used in a bunch of kind of like fun, diverse ways. Fantastic.

Oh, and we're about outta time, but you know what, we didn't even mention the website. How do people get more information about times? com and you'll find all kinds of useful information, use cases, solutions, white papers, webinars, all that stuff is there.

Fantastic. Owen, thank you for coming up here on Tech Trunk TV and getting us a little bit smart about times and, and ai, uh, features in it as well as your background. Man, what a great story.

Come back and keep us posted on what you got going on there, and congratulations. It's been my pleasure, Alan. Thank you, man.

Appreciate it. All righty. Owen Hinchey, CEO Co-founder at Tides here on Textron tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back with more.