After a Historic Data Breach, He Built Tines to Fix Security

This is the story of Eoin Hinchy, a farmer's son from rural Ireland who spent fifteen years inside the most attacked companies on the planet, watched brilliant security engineers burn out doing the same tasks over and over, and built Tines from a tiny office under a bridge in Dublin into one of the world's most important AI workflow platforms.

A Farm, an Almanac, and a Philosophy That Came Before the Company

Eoin Hinchy didn’t grow up thinking about Silicon Valley or billion dollar valuations. He grew up on an Irish farm, in a house where there was no allowance for anything other than constant focus, intense awareness, and fierce perseverance on seeing through whatever had to be seen through whether success was guaranteed or not.

His parents' farmer's almanac was neither decoration nor memento. It was an action plan. It was how his parents considered their alternatives, how they predicted the unpredictable, and how they operated in conditions of genuine uncertainty. Identify what you can control. Pay attention. Adjust as needed. Make what you're doing last.

Eoin has said as much in various interviews and has often credited this upbringing directly for the culture he eventually created at Tines. Long after he left the farm and when he eventually published the Tines Almanac, a detailed and honest breakdown of the company's strategy, metrics and priorities that the company made public for anyone to read, he was not performing an ingenious marketing play. He was taking lessons he learned in those long years watching his parents on the farm and applying them to a world he didn't truly control.

That detail is important. The company that you create flows from the person that you are. And that person, for a long time, was Eoin Hinchy and a farm in Ireland before a single line of code was ever written.

Building the Technical Foundation: Engineering, Security, and an MBA From Imperial

Got off the farm and into engineering. Studied Electronic Engineering, then computer engineering, then a Master's in security and forensic computing at Dublin City University. Then an MBA from Imperial College London, one of the UK's leading business schools.

Not by chance, though, because he was also busy with two different skill sets – the highly technical 'understanding of how security systems function at a level most people have never seen,' and the business savvy of 'how the organisation really works, how decisions are actually made, and how the technology products do outside of a lab.'

Few technical founders possess the first one, let alone two, as Eoin did when he launched. And he wasn't keeping those few years of skills-collecting separate. It was practice.

He spent the early years of his career at Deloitte as a software engineer in their security group, then moved to eBay, where one of the world's most complex and attacked technology platforms required its users to work within the global threat management group and eventually manage the European operations security group.

What he found there, and in all the other major tech companies where he worked, was the same in varying shapes and forms. Brilliant minds, bound in flawed systems, spending days doing things that should have been automated decades before.

The Breach That Changed Everything

2014. Eoin Hinchy, the head of European security for eBay. One of the biggest data breaches in internet history. 145 million user records compromised. Data that contained details such as name, address, Date of Birth, phone number, and encrypted password. This has been undetected for 229 days. Eoin was off on his honeymoon, and when he got back, he found out it had occurred under his command. The experience-the horror of 145 million personal identities compromised, that highly qualified, dedicated, hard-working team members hadn't detected an intrusion that occurred for more than 7 months-would change how Eoin Hinchy thought about security, forever. It wasn't the people. They were brilliant, hard-working people. The system and environment they were working in were the problem: thousands of alerts per day, manually triaged, data distributed over siloed systems, manually complying with rules and regulations, and manual repetitive actions like the same incident response report written 100 times because the team did not have expertise in the complicated coding for automation. In this case, the math was simple: take 10,000 security alerts per day. 75% are false positives. The time to analyse an alert is 20 minutes. Then the team is spending tens of thousands of hours per week pursuing phantom threats while real threats get lost in the noise. It makes perfect sense that this particular breach went undetected for over 7 months. The system was built to drown the security team. Eoin was later promoted to Sr. Dir. Of Security Ops for DocuSign and, together with his old friend, Thomas Kinsella, discovered the same problem with the company as well.

The Colleague Who Became a Co-Founder

Thomas Kinsella had lived a life uncannily similar to Eoin's. He, too, had worked at Deloitte, then at eBay, and finally at DocuSign, where he became a senior director of security operations. He and Eoin had known each other long enough to become something beyond just colleagues. They were intellectual partners.

Both men had run security operations at DocuSign in 2017. On any given day, their teams were doing the same things they had done the day before. They triaged alerts. They researched the same kinds of threats, wrote the same response playbooks by hand, and patched the same categories of vulnerability. They had an important job. And a soul-destroying one, in a very specific and harmful sense.

Eoin will tell you that the sight of the brightest of security engineers burning out within two years of joining a team was a defining moment that compelled him to build Tines. These engineers possessed tremendous technical skill and passion; they had chosen cybersecurity to do real, intellectually demanding work, but inside the security operations centre, 80% of their time was frittered away on repetitive manual tasks that would have been child's play for any moderately clever piece of software.

The burnout wasn't an accident. It was systemic. It weakened all organisations because the very people who could find and fix actual threats were too exhausted to care, having already spent the bulk of their working days on tasks that didn't need to occupy their minds.

Thomas saw the same problems through the same lens, and when Eoin proposed that he help him build a solution, Thomas was immediately on board.

Together, the two men founded Tines in 2018.

The Tiny Office Under the Bridge

Tines was incorporated in Dublin in 2018. Its first office was so small it could charitably be described as intimate. It was located under a bridge in Dublin city, the type of room you're only likely to rent out of sheer lack of other options rather than inspired vision.

The company's original philosophy was clear from day one. Security teams needed to be able to automate any workflow, no matter how complex, without someone having to know how to code to build it. Not because coding is bad. But because the analyst who is most qualified to understand the threat landscape is not always the person capable of writing a Python script, requiring a security operations team to depend on a small group of people who are good at both is a chokepoint that leaves the organisation vulnerable.

Tines was built around the concept that Eoin and Thomas called the Agent Automation Architecture. Six different types of agents are designed to perform a wide range of actions, which can then be chained together via a drag-and-drop interface to automate processes from alert triage to incident response to compliance checking—no coding required. Nothing required a developer. A security analyst with a deep understanding of the problem developed a solution.

The user interface was designed to be beautiful. This wasn't out of vanity. Eoin had a clear and rational view that the user interfaces of security tools traditionally intimidated users and prevented them from adopting the technology. If the software looked like it required a computer science degree to use, people who would actually use it the most would be the least likely even to open the application. If the interface is enjoyable and easy to use, it can make the software competitive, even when other software on the market looks like something designed by engineers for engineers.

This design philosophy carried over into some of its first hires. Not only did they hire engineers and security experts, but Tines also hired a designer and a customer success engineer very early on. This was something other enterprise security startups at the time found peculiar, viewing design as something to consider only after a company had product-market fit. Eoin, on the other hand, viewed product-market fit and design as the same.

First Major Client: A Fortune 5 Company Under a Bridge

Eoin and Thomas brought in Tines's first 10 customers themselves from their networks of people that they'd worked with previously, people who had worked with them at eBay, at DocuSign and at Deloitte, and people who trusted their technical opinion and would be willing to give a two-person office under a bridge products a real chance. And in the words of Eoin, most of them were probably only doing it to do Eoin and Thomas a favour. That changed. One Fortune 5 pharmaceutical company, one of the five largest companies on Earth by revenue, had agreed to put Tines through a formal evaluation against two of the most established players on the market for security automation, at $60B and $30B valuation each, over multiple geographies in Security Operations Centres across Security Operations Centres around the world, to see who performed better. Tines won decisively on ease of use and reliability, not by a margin. Two people in a tiny office in Dublin beat two billion-dollar companies head-to-head, in perhaps the most challenging possible enterprise environment. It wasn't a fluke. This wasn't the result of chance. It was because Tines was designed for how security practitioners did their jobs, rather than how their vendors believed they should. Eoin had experienced the problem; he hadn't researched it or surveyed people on it. He had experienced the frustrations with tools that were either too brittle, too difficult, or too inflexible for security engineers to use and automate their tasks efficiently. He had built what he wanted to have existed.

Series A and the Backing of Accel

In 2019, Tines closed its Series A round with Accel, one of Europe's top firms for both reputation and financial success. Luca Bocchio, the partner at Accel leading the investment, elaborated on why the firm invested in Tines at such an early stage: "Eoin and Thomas were themselves security operators for over a decade. They had first-hand experience with the pain and tedious, manual workflows that security teams face everywhere. They weren't creating a solution to something they thought might be a problem. They were creating a solution for something they had been doing for over a decade, every day, across the hardest company environments in the world." The funds from the Series A went towards growing the team and building the commercial capabilities needed to scale the company beyond the founder network. Tines began hiring extensively across engineering, sales, and customer success, and established offices in Boston and San Francisco, in addition to its Dublin base. Eoin's time spent working in the San Francisco Bay Area had given him a realistic view of both the upsides and costs of building there. Ireland boasted an unprecedented pool of engineering and commercial talent. Partly, this was a result of the massive investment in Ireland by large technology companies that had set up European headquarters in Dublin over the preceding 20 years. Still, the depth and breadth of the talent pool, along with reasonable costs and proximity to the US market, kept time zone differences manageable. He told reporters that there was no longer a prerequisite for moving to the Bay Area to build a meaningful tech company; Tines was just another demonstration of this thesis.

The Company That Burned Out Its Own Best People

The least addressed and most important piece of the Tines story: what was the actual world price of this problem. In 2025 an independent survey identified that 83% of security professionals suffered from lasting alert fatigue, and the International Information System Security Certification Consortium estimated that there were 4.8 million globally missing in the cybersecurity workforce. Talent and retention issues combined: skilled personnel were suffering burnout and leaving their posts, often just two years in. These two were far from mutually exclusive: the talent shortage was largely an outgrowth of what being a security professional actually entailed. Highly trained, intelligent, technical experts in one of the most critical and technically challenging fields of modern technology were spending 90% of their workdays on dull, tedious tasks. They weren't leaving because the work didn't matter; they were leaving because the work they were doing had become meaningless due to the systems they were working with. This 15-year experience in the security trenches of companies like eBay and DocuSign gave Eoin immense empathy for his frontline teams. As late as 2024, Eoin considered himself a practitioner first, and a CEO second, and was building not an abstract thing but an embodiment of what he himself would have needed when triaging alerts at eBay and managing incident response at DocuSign. This experience and conviction about the product is the through line of the Tines story, and what makes the Fortune 5 trial possible and has enabled them to focus on utility rather than market capture.

Series B, the $50 Million extension, and the Road to Unicorn

In October 2022, Tines raised a $35M Series B round led by Accel and Felicis. In April 2024, Tines announced a $50M extension of that round, also led by Accel and Felicis. The extension was necessitated by performance exceeding investors' optimistic expectations; annual recurring revenue had increased by more than 100% in the past fiscal year and by more than 200% since the original Series B. Headcount had increased by 30%.

By now, it was obvious that Tines was not just a security startup. Tines was being used by security teams, IT ops teams, DevOps teams, and compliance functions of all types, from Series A startups to Fortune 10s. The platform had evolved far beyond security automation; it was an intelligent workflow platform for complex workflows for virtually any enterprise function.

Customers included Coinbase, Databricks, CrowdStrike, Intercom, and Canva. It was also used by major financial services institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies to automate mission-critical workflows. The platform was already completing over 1B actions a week.

In the middle of 2024, Eoin shipped Workbench, an AI conversation interface that enabled users to interact with the Tines platform and their workflows. It wasn't just another skin on top of a product; it was the product that Eoin said it would be one day, where there was no distance between the intention of a human and the execution of an automated system.

Eoin had been holding off on introducing AI to the product for over a year, despite pressure from his customers, his competitors, and indeed his own team, because the technology hadn't yet reached a level of stability to operate mission-critical security and IT workflows. By September 12th 2024, when Eoin finally launched Workbench, he felt that it was time and had seen the platform used by over 70% of Tines' existing users in just months.

The Almanac: Radical Transparency as a Competitive Strategy

In 2024, Tines put out the Tines Almanac. Not a press release. Not a fluffy marketing piece. Not just a sun-and-roses kind of report. But the kind of honest reporting on strategy, goals, metrics and thinking that is accessible for anyone – including your competitors – if you choose to look.

The numbers inside were stellar. 122% net revenue retention, signifying that existing customers spent more year over year on Tines. 357 features shipped in 12 months. 302% increase in LLM use by customers. Enterprise wins at SAP and Experian.

The strategy behind the document, however, was more informative than any metric. Eoin grew up on a farm where almanacks were used to predict and adapt to conditions they couldn't control. This is the logic Eoin applies to building a tech company. These are the facts we know. These are what we're doing. These are what we don't know. The almanac concludes with, quite intentionally, blank pages, as according to Eoin, the future cannot be forecast, but built.

Publishing competitively sensitive information publicly is exactly what most tech companies won't do. Eoin's thinking is simple and to the point: if an advantage comes from information asymmetry only, you don't have a true advantage. True advantage comes from exceptionally happy customers, velocity and building/shipping more than anyone else. Revealing the strategy to competitors didn't harm any of these core advantages; it eliminated ambiguity regarding what's important.

The $1.1 Billion Series C

In February 2025, Tines announced a $125m Series C funding round led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with new investors SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Activant and returning investors Accel, Felicis, CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and Addition. The company's valuation is $1.125 billion, making Tines a unicorn and one of the very few Irish tech companies ever to reach that valuation.

This brings Tines' lifetime funding total to $272m.

Eoin's response to the valuation was as far removed from a self-congratulatory celebration as the way he had discussed Tines since the day he and Thomas Kinsella sat down under a bridge in Dublin. "IT and security teams are still overwhelmed by a backlog of repetitive and thankless tasks, and traditional automation tools are more often a hindrance rather than a help. The opportunity for Tines is to orchestrate all the modern and secure workflows in the enterprise."

No hubris, no victory dance, just restating the problem and the enormous amount of work still to be done.

What the Hard Parts Actually Looked Like

Eoin has, atypically for a sitting CEO, been very candid about how hard the whole ride has been. The first couple of years were intensely personally difficult in ways that do not show up in growth metrics. A first-time founder (his own words), he had no prior burning ambition to found a company until he realised he could no longer tolerate the fact that all these skilled engineers were stuck in broken processes. The process of moving from the practitioner who lived with the problem every day to the CEO who needed to engineer a company to solve it demanded that he quickly learn a different skill set. The relationship with Thomas Kinsella, described publicly as one in which they "argued like cats and dogs," demanded the level of trust that can only grow out of working closely with someone for years and developing the confidence that they share the same goal, even if they disagree on the path. That was not always the most amicable relationship. It was, in Eoin's words, a "founder-soulmate" situation: two people who saw the same thing so clearly that they could co-build it. The COVID years did bring additional operational complexity; you can't build an enterprise that spans Dublin, Boston and San Francisco through a pandemic without the even-keeled agility of decision-making that Eoin has identified as stemming from his farm experience: You cannot change the weather, but you can adapt to it. Finally, there was the simple difficulty of building a company when incumbent vendors were giants, and buyers were inherently risk-averse. Fortune 500 buyers do not make buying decisions quickly or on a whim. Landing one Fortune 500 evaluation is one thing; engineering a commercial infrastructure to enable it to be repeated across hundreds of Fortune 500 customers takes a degree of process and patience well beyond the product's technical work.

Current Status: Tines in 2026

Today, Tines is one of the world's largest intelligent workflow platforms with dual HQs in Dublin and Boston and offices in San Francisco, serving customers in over 30 countries worldwide. The platform now orchestrates over a billion automated actions every week on behalf of more than 500 customers. With 122% net revenue retention, the company is growing within its existing customer base, not just retaining customers. This clearly indicates that customers are experiencing real value from the platform and that it is satisfying a purchasing need rather than a buying need. In Eoin's own words, the company's main direction is to become the central orchestrator of modern enterprise workflows. The two main use cases remain Security and IT, but the product is being developed into DevOps, Compliance, and Operational Risk use cases within the enterprise. With the AI functionalities available through Workbench and further developments, these are becoming central to how a customer will interface with Tines, and LLM adoption at the enterprise customer level is happening just as fast as everywhere else and is increasing among Tines customers. The leadership team has significantly expanded. The Chief Revenue Officer position is now filled by Terry Tripp, who was with MuleSoft, and the COO and CFO positions are filled by Heather Planishek, who has been Palantir's Chief Accounting Officer. Thomas Kinsella remains the Chief Customer Officer, which is what he has always been best at anyway - ensuring that users are succeeding on Tines. The almanac continues to be updated and published, empty pages and all.

What Eoin Hinchy's Story Teaches Every Founder

The Tines story is not a market disruption story. It's a story about caring deeply and patiently for a specific problem affecting a specific group of people.

Eoin Hinchy had lived inside the problem for 15 years before he shipped the solution. That is a stunningly long runway for a founder. Most would have bailed a decade or two ago and gone out to take the opportunity before they'd had the perspective and empathy actually to solve it with something wildly different. His patience wasn't one of caution; it was one of compounding. Each year spent at Deloitte, then at eBay, and then at DocuSign made him a better founder than the years he could have spent building something already.

The breach he returned home to from his honeymoon was the inflexion point. Not because it angered him, although it did. Rather, because it rendered the stakes in a way that a market study simply could not: 145 million unique user records exposed, not because the tool was missing from a well-funded, technically savvy team of security analysts who would have needed to remediate manually, but because no tool existed for the job. The tool that wasn't there, he built.

The decision to build under a bridge in Dublin rather than in the Bay Area was a specific, declarative act. Eoin believed strongly that significant tech companies could and should be built in Ireland, that the talent existed here and that the culture was capable. The presumption that you needed to head to San Francisco to be somebody seemed like a rule to be challenged. Today, Tines is a unicorn serving customers across every continent and funded by names like Goldman Sachs and SoftBank; it's a clear repudiation of that assumption.

Most importantly of all, his core Almanack lesson, adapted from farming and which he takes with him most deeply, is to do what you can do. Make your decisions known. Don't pretend you don't know what you don't know. Plan for the long term, even in the face of shortcuts and pressures to accelerate. Leave the last pages blank.

Final Thought: Still a Practitioner First

When Eoin Hinchy stood at Black Hat in Las Vegas in August of 2024, wearing a pink Tines T-shirt and jeans, presenting to 20,000 of the most senior cybersecurity professionals in the world, he wasn't masquerading as the CEO of a billion-dollar business. He was doing what he has always done: talking to security practitioners about their jobs, their frustrations, and, he believes, a better way to do it.

He still calls himself a practitioner before he is a CEO. He doesn't say this as false humility; it is, in fact, the way he has always seen himself in relation to his work. That orientation is what the company is built around. The product is built around it. The culture is built around it.

From a farm in Ireland, to a tiny under-a-bridge office in Dublin, to a $1.1 billion company with customers in thirty countries around the world, Eoin Hinchy built a career and a business out of one single, obstinate idea-that the people safeguarding the world's most critical digital systems, aren't being given the right tools to do so, and that the way to build those tools, was to be on the ground, with them, in their systems, under their pressure, long enough to really understand the problem from the inside, out.

That's exactly what he did. Today, the world's security teams are less tired, and its data is better secured.