Two Incident Management Startups Join Forces, FireHydrant Acquires Blameless

FireHydrant, a New York-based incident management startup that launched in 2019, announced Wednesday that it has acquired Blameless, a former competitor. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.

Both companies help site reliability engineers (SREs) navigate the difficult task of keeping software and sites up and running. When something goes wrong, they help SRE teams find and fix the problem. When it’s all over, they help them conduct a post-mortem to learn what happened and what processes need to be put in place to prevent similar incidents in the future.

FireHydrant founder and CEO Robert Ross says the company has expanded its capabilities over the past few years to include incident detection, suppression and prevention, creating a platform of services. Earlier this year, the company also added Signals, an incident notification tool for on-call IT staff that competes with PagerDuty.

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

“The way we see it is we built this platform and added all the components that really give us end-to-end incident management, and Blameless had some things that were on our roadmap, like enterprise-class integrations with companies like ServiceNow,” Ross told TechCrunch.

That ServiceNow integration and another deep integration with Microsoft Teams were big reasons why FireHydrant wanted to join forces with Blameless. The two CEOs started talking about a possible deal in February, right after FireHydrant released Signals, and worked together for months to craft an agreement that would be acceptable to all stakeholders.

“So the opportunity came together in a pretty unique way, I would say, and it was exciting, so 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 keep Blameless as a standalone platform for a short period of time, but will eventually retire the brand around the middle of next year, when all the features are built into FireHydrant. Blameless customers will become FireHydrant customers over the next year, and the two companies are working together to let customers know what the transition will look like.

Blameless was founded in 2017 and has raised $50 million, according to Crunchbase.

According to Crunchbase, FireHydrant raised more than $30 million, but the company indicated that it received an undisclosed amount of additional funding at the time of the Blameless acquisition, which, along with increased revenue from Blameless customers, should provide the company with years of growth.

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