The Only Moat That Matters

On a scorching afternoon in Las Vegas in August 2024—the city's hottest summer on record—more than 20,000 cybersecurity professionals streamed past the Mandalay Bay's gilded poker tables and chiming slot machines toward the convention center for Black Hat, the industry's marquee annual gathering.

Among the over 400 vendor booths competing for attention in the cavernous Business Hall, one stood out: #1132, home to Tines, an intelligent workflow platform. Where competitors leaned into blacks and reds, Tines went pastel, with its signature purple branding and cheerful balloons bobbing overhead.

At the center of the booth: Eoin Hinchy, relaxed in a pink Tines t-shirt and jeans as he delivered a talk titled "Transforming Perspectives: A Founder's Journey from AI Skeptic to AI Advocate." He fielded questions from the crowd of worried engineers and Chief Information Security Officers: "How can I use AI without exposing myself to security and privacy risks? How can I have AI work on my behalf?"

The questions were ones he'd been living with for over a year. Eoin was in Vegas to introduce Workbench, an AI-powered chat interface and the most significant new product in Tines's history, set to launch in five weeks. While competitors had raced to ship AI features that looked impressive in demos but buckled under real-world pressure, Tines's engineers steadily pushed through over 70 iterations, refusing to launch until they'd built something that would deliver. Workbench was meant to be the next evolution of the flexible, vendor-agnostic platform its customers had come to rely on: a conversational AI layer letting teams query proprietary data and act on it in natural language.

Meanwhile, back in Dublin — where Tines is co-headquartered — engineers watched their Slack light up with concerns. AWS servers in the EU were experiencing a "capacity crunch (opens in new tab)" from exploding AI demand, creating headwinds for the Workbench launch in the United States and Europe.

Eoin had held the line for over a year, weathering pressure from customers demanding answers, competitors shipping flashy demos, and his own team's restless conviction that the moment had arrived. The product was ready. He decided that was enough.

On September 12, 2024, Workbench went live in the United States. A tiered European rollout followed. Seventy percent of existing customers adopted it within months, and Tines's customer base grew as Workbench met an urgent need security and IT teams had been searching to fill. By early 2025, Tines was valued at over $1 billion.

But building one of Ireland's only unicorns was never part of Eoin's plan. He’d simply set out to solve a problem that had plagued him for years, and discovered it was universal.

Born in security, used by everyone

Eoin felt his initial skepticism of AI hype was hard-earned. After 15 years in cybersecurity, he'd watched countless vendors promise revolutionary tools that failed to deliver. While working as eBay’s EMEA Lead for Global Threat Management, the company’s 2014 breach crystallized what was at stake. He returned from his honeymoon to the hack: 145 million records compromised, undetected for 229 days.

Later, he joined DocuSign as Director of Information Security. He and longtime colleague Thomas Kinsella watched their talented teams spend 80% of their time (opens in new tab) on tasks they'd already done that day — triaging thousands of daily alerts, stitching together fragmented security tools, manually verifying compliance. It was the kind of soul-crushing work that burns out the best security practitioners within two years. A 2025 study (opens in new tab) confirms their original thesis: 83% of security professionals report chronic alert fatigue, and a 2024 report (opens in new tab) from ISC2 — the world's leading nonprofit for cybersecurity professionals — puts the global talent shortage at 4.8 million.

“My 15 years in security gave me a deep sense of empathy for those frontline teams who are inundated with alerts and burnout and churn," says Eoin, who still sees himself as a practitioner first, CEO second. “I didn't found Tines because I wanted to build a product, or loved doing sales, or have ‘entrepreneur’ in my LinkedIn bio. I started Tines because I really believe there's a better way for mission critical frontline teams to operate.”

Eoin and Thomas launched Tines in February 2018 to "democratize automation.” Their drag-and-drop interface, designed as a storyboard, made it easy for non-technical users to automate tasks that used to take hours.

Some of their first hires, like a designer and customer success engineer, were unconventional choices for security and automation. Eoin believed security tools' traditionally intimidating interfaces were a barrier to adoption. The product’s look, feel, and user-friendliness were essential from day one, he says, and remain a key differentiator.

Their first major client put them through a trial by fire. The Fortune 5 pharmaceutical company ran simultaneous A/B tests across globally distributed Security Operations Centers, pitting Tines—then two guys working in a tiny office under a bridge in Dublin—against established competitors valued at $60 billion and $30 billion respectively. Tines won decisively on ease of use and reliability. The pharmaceutical giant remains a client today. Within two years, Tines had raised a $4.1 million Series A.

Operationalizing customer obsession through culture

When Covid hit, they'd just signed a three-year lease on new Dublin office space, believing co-location was critical for cohesion as they brought on their first 20 employees. They hit their hiring target anyway, albeit remotely, and working as a distributed team ultimately became integral to their culture. By 2022 they'd reached 150 employees and were bringing in marquee clients like Coinbase (opens in new tab), which reported 66% reduction (opens in new tab) in IT onboarding time, and MyFitnessPal, which turned to Tines to automate security for its 200 million users (opens in new tab).

The company operates in a relatively flat structure despite its growth to nearly 500 employees. "Everybody is empowered to question everybody else's decision," says Eoin, "There's no sense of, this decision came from some VP, so I better just do it."

Eoin built the company around three values: speed, simplicity, and soundness (an Irish colloquialism for moral integrity). Employees face decisions by weighing them against these values. A dedicated Slack channel celebrates when people embody them. It's how Eoin operationalizes what he sees as the only sustainable advantage: speed and customer focus.

The approach shows in Tines’s satisfaction metrics: 4.9 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights, 91 out of 100 on Info-Tech's SoftwareReviews, and #1 highest-rated across G2's security categories.

Eoin stayed close to sales despite his lack of formal training. Speaking practitioners' language built trust. When customers would ask (opens in new tab) for bespoke solutions, he'd counter any internal pushback with: “Are they going to pay for the product? Build it. ”

The white-glove attention drove massive results for their customers: after Elastic's security team partnered with Tines to automate alert investigation, their first workflow saved 93 days of analyst time in just one week, and today they triage over 50,000 alerts monthly. Customers became evangelists, sharing Tines’s workflows in community forums and recommending it to peers at other companies.

Then OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, and everything changed.

Transparency as strategy

Requests flooded in from customers, partners, and investors. "How are you upgrading your product?” Customers worried about being left behind, and they looked to Tines for a solution. For months, Tines's response was candid: "We don't know." Eoin was deeply skeptical AI would turn out to be another hype cycle and wanted to do right by his customers. At first, the decision to wait seemed costly. Competitors they'd been "beating hand over fist" suddenly had impressive AI-powered demos. "At a very high surface level, it looked like it worked," Eoin admitted.

But his product and engineering teams didn't wait for permission. They started testing basic AI features, and formed a private Slack channel for those who had independently identified the same larger opportunity: the need for a secure "plumbing" layer that allowed companies to use LLMs to safely query and act on proprietary organizational data. It was in that Slack channel that a vision began to emerge — one that would ultimately become Workbench: an AI interface purpose-built for the complex, cross-functional workflows Tines customers run in security teams and beyond. By combining deterministic and agentic workflows, Workbench allows users to automatically investigate a security alert, cross-reference it against proprietary threat data, block a malicious domain, and file a ticket in a single conversational exchange, all with full auditability and oversight.

Along the way, the co-founders' stance on AI also changed. Eoin eventually got fully on board, writing a blog post (opens in new tab) about his journey from AI skeptic to advocate that would become the foundation for his Vegas talk. His decision to hold the line, and do it transparently, built trust and bought time.

Every week, Eoin showed stakeholders his team’s experiments: what they tried, why it failed, the results, the follow-up iterations. Board members got access to internal data repositories. The monthly shipping cadence — 30 customer-benefiting changes monthly — created momentum even during failures. “Shipping is a dialogue with our customers and our investors,” he says. A Series B extension led by Felicis pushed them across the finish line.

“Eoin’s level of transparency built trust in a way that's rare," says Jake Storm, general partner at Felicis Ventures. “He gave us complete visibility into their process, including the setbacks. That integrity, combined with his conviction about what the product needed to be, gave us confidence to back him even as his AI vision was emerging.”

Eoin’s conviction — and all of the delays and iterations that accompanied it — paid off. Tines secured the additional EU compute it needed for Workbench’s launch, and right after Black Hat, the product launched. It was, as one engineer later put it, "right to the wire."

Today 1.5 billion automated workflows run on Tines weekly. The platform's expansion beyond security — 30% of customers are IT— reflects a bet that's been building for years. “We knew we could make security teams successful since we'd lived that world for 15 years,” Eoin says. “The big question was: could we build a product that solves for their acute needs, but also allows teams like IT and engineering to leverage this platform?” The answer, it turns out, was yes.

The only moat that matters

When he was growing up near Galway's windswept coast, Eoin's parents bought a Farmer's Almanac each year. The booklet listed the controllables: sunrises, full moons, high tides, when to plant crops. A plan built around certainty, not speculation. As Tines prepared for its March 2026 annual “Company Kickoff” meeting in Galway, Eoin reached for the same instinct. He crowdsourced insights across the company into a 160-page strategic roadmap for the year ahead he calls the Tines Almanac (opens in new tab).

The Almanac is, in many ways, the Tines customer relationship writ large: the same radical transparency Eoin’s practiced with his board and his engineering team, now extended to everyone. The priorities reveal a company charting a course far beyond its SOAR origins: doubling down on intelligent workflows as a category, investing in product-led growth to let users experience the platform without a sales call, expanding into new markets like Japan and Australia, and pursuing higher governance standards to serve public sector clients. 2025 was both the hardest and most successful year (opens in new tab) in Tines’s history: they achieved 200% enterprise customer growth, 122% net revenue retention, and shipped 357 product features. But that pace of growth is grueling. The Almanac was written to make the company durable even as it scales. It's meant for their employees, customers, and partners, but Eoin expects competitors will see it, too. He thinks the transparency is worth the tradeoff.

"We're in such a strong position to control our own destiny," he says. "If we don't become a breakout company, it won't be because of a competitor or AI or tariffs. It'll be because we failed to execute." Tines's original moats—no-code, vendor neutrality—he says, will quickly become table stakes: "The only moat is wildly successful customers and moving faster than anybody else."