Two Startups Specializing in Incident Management Merge, with FireHydrant Acquiring Blameless

FireHydrant, a burgeoning incident management venture based in NYC and launched in 2019, has officially announced its acquisition of Blameless, a once rival company, this past Wednesday. The acquisition’s financial details were not disclosed by the entities involved.

Both firms provide essential support to SREs (site reliability engineers) in the challenging task of ensuring software and websites remain operational. They aid SRE teams in identifying and remedying failures, and following an incident, they assist in conducting a thorough examination to uncover the root cause and develop strategies to avert similar future events.

According to Robert Ross, the founder and CEO of FireHydrant, the company has broadened its suite of services in recent years to encompass incident identification, suppression, and prevention, evolving into a comprehensive platform. Additionally, FireHydrant has introduced Signals earlier this year, an incident alert tool for IT personnel on standby, positioning itself as a competitor to PagerDuty.

The acquisition of Blameless endows FireHydrant with new capabilities previously unavailable, along with access to an array of enterprise clients, including CrowdStrike, a name recently in the headlines due to a significant incident. The roster of clients extends to notable names such as Palo Alto Networks, VMware, and Ticketmaster among others.

“We envisage that we are crafting this platform and integrating all components needed for complete end-to-end incident management. Blameless possessed several elements we had targeted in our roadmap, including advanced integrations with enterprises like ServiceNow,” Ross shared with TechCrunch.

Significant integrations with ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams significantly propelled FireHydrant’s decision to merge with Blameless. The CEOs of both companies initiated discussions about a potential merger in February, following the release of Signals, and spent months negotiating an agreement beneficial for all parties involved.

“It presented a unique opportunity, which was quite thrilling. We undertook considerable effort to ensure it was appealing for our investors, their investors, and the unified team,” he elaborated.

In the near term, Blameless will continue to operate autonomously, but FireHydrant plans to absorb its functionality fully by mid-next year, after which the Blameless brand will be phased out. Over the coming year, Blameless customers will transition to FireHydrant, with both companies already preparing their users for this change.

Founded in 2017, Blameless succeeded in securing $50 million in funding, according to data from Crunchbase.

Having raised more than $30 million as per Crunchbase records, FireHydrant revealed it received an undisclosed sum of additional funding at the time of acquiring Blameless. This financial boost, combined with the new revenue stream from Blameless’s customer base, is expected to sustain the company for many years.

The acquisition has been finalized, and Blameless staff involved in the deal have joined the FireHydrant team this week. As part of the agreement, Blameless board members Vas Natarajan from Accel and Dan Moskowitz from Third Point Ventures are now part of FireHydrant’s board of directors.