Two incident management startups join forces as FireHydrant nabs Blameless | TechCrunch

FireHydrant, a NYC incident management startup that launched in 2019, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Blameless, a former competitor. The companies did not share the purchase price.

Both companies help SREs (site reliability engineers) deal with the daunting job of keeping software and websites up and running. When things go wrong, they help SRE teams find and resolve the issue. When it’s over, they help them conduct a post mortem to figure out what happened and what processes to put in place to help prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

FireHydrant founder and CEO Robert Ross says the company has been expanding its capabilities over the last few years to include incident detection, suppression and prevention to create a platform of services. Earlier this year, the company also added Signals, an incidents alerts tool for IT personnel on call that competes with PagerDuty.

Acquiring Blameless gives the company additional functionality that it didn’t have along with a list of enterprise customers that includes CrowdStrike, a company that you might have heard had a major incident last month. Other customers include Palo Alto Networks, VMware and Ticketmaster among others.

“The way we see it is that we have been building this platform and adding all the components that really, truly give us end-to-end incident management, and Blameless had a few of the pieces that have been on our roadmap, such as enterprise grade integrations with companies like ServiceNow,” Ross told TechCrunch.

That ServiceNow integration and another deep integration with Microsoft Teams was a big part of why FireHydrant wanted to combine forces with Blameless. The two CEOs began chatting about a possible deal in February, right after FireHydrant released Signals, and worked together for months forging an agreement that would be palatable for all stakeholders.

“So the opportunity kind of came up pretty uniquely, I would say, and it was exciting, and we had to do the work to make it exciting for our investors, their investors, and also for the combined team,” he said.

The company plans to leave Blameless as a stand-alone platform for the short term, but by the middle of next year when it has all the functionality built into FireHydrant, it will eventually deprecate the brand. Blameless customers will become FireHydrant customers over the next year, and the two companies have been working together to let customers know what that transition will look like.

Blameless was founded in 2017 and raised $50 million along the way, per Crunchbase.

FireHydrant has raised over $30 million, per Crunchbase, but the company indicated that it got an undisclosed amount of additional funding at the time it acquired Blameless which, along with the increased revenue from the Blameless customer base, should give the company years of runway.

The deal has closed and Blameless employees who were included in the deal became part of FireHydrant this week. Under the terms of the deal, Blameless board members Vas Natarajan from Accel and Dan Moskowitz from Third Point Ventures have joined FireHydrant’s board of directors.