Inside Tines' €1bn Bet: How a Dublin Security Startup Built the Formula Others Keep Copying
Most founders spend their first decade dreaming about the unicorn valuation. Tines got there and immediately announced 500 new hires.
That tells you everything about the difference between a founder building a company and a founder building an exit. Eoin Anderson and the team at Tines crossed the billion-euro threshold and treated it as a starting point, not a finish line. In an Irish tech landscape where acquisition before scale has become a familiar pattern, that posture is genuinely unusual. It deserves a closer look.
What Tines Actually Does
Strip out the jargon and Tines does one thing well: it lets security teams automate the repetitive work that currently burns out analysts. Think of a hospital with one triage nurse doing paperwork instead of seeing patients. That is what a security operations centre looks like before Tines. Alerts pile up, analysts click through the same five screens for the thousandth time, and the actual threats get lost in the noise.
Tines built a no-code workflow platform that lets those analysts automate the clicking. No developer required. You draw the workflow, connect the tools, and the machine handles the repetition. The analyst goes back to thinking.
That is not a glamorous pitch. It is, however, a very sticky product. Once a security team has built fifty workflows inside your platform, they are not migrating on a whim. Switching costs are real, and Tines understood that before most of its competitors did.
The Three Decisions That Built the Moat
There is a sequence here that matters. Order is everything.
Step 1: Solve the practitioner's problem, not the CISO's PowerPoint. Most enterprise security vendors sell upward. They build features that look impressive in a procurement deck and frustrate the people who actually use them daily. Tines built for the analyst at the keyboard. That created word-of-mouth inside security communities before the sales team ever arrived. You cannot buy that kind of credibility. You earn it by making someone's Tuesday afternoon less painful.
Step 2: Make the platform genuinely accessible before you charge enterprise prices. Tines offered a free tier that let teams build real workflows without a procurement cycle. That sounds like a give-away. It was actually a land-and-expand machine. Teams built on the free tier, proved the value internally, and then went to their budget holders with a working product rather than a vendor proposal. The sales conversation was already half won.
Step 3: Move into AI when the market needed it, not when the press wanted you to. The new AI-native platform is not a rebrand. It extends the core logic into agentic workflows, where AI handles decision points that previously needed human review. The timing matters. Security teams are drowning in AI-generated threats from attackers who, as Irish financial firms are already discovering, have better tools than the defenders. Tines is selling to that fear directly. That is honest positioning.
The 500 Hires Number in Real Terms
Five hundred roles sounds like a press release. Put it in context and it becomes a structural statement. Tines had roughly 300 employees before this expansion. Adding 500 means the company will be roughly 2.6 times its current size. That is not a marginal growth plan. That is a bet that the market for security automation is large enough to absorb a much bigger company than Tines currently is.
Dublin will absorb a chunk of those roles, which matters for the local talent pool. Enterprise software engineers, product managers, and go-to-market people in the security space are not in surplus anywhere in Ireland. Tines is effectively signalling that it will compete hard for the same people that Google, Meta, and the other hyperscalers have been hoovering up along the Grand Canal for fifteen years. The difference is that Tines is offering equity in a growing private company rather than a salary in an established one. That trade appeals to a specific kind of person: the builder over the beneficiary.
Why Others Keep Copying the Formula
Workflow automation for security is not a secret category. ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, and a dozen VC-backed American startups are all circling the same problem. The copying is, paradoxically, validation. When well-resourced competitors reverse-engineer your product roadmap, you have found genuine demand. Tines is not worried about being copied because the moat is not the technology. The moat is the practitioner community, the workflow library, and the trust built by years of not overselling.
That community dynamic is hard to replicate from scratch. A competitor can match features in eighteen months. They cannot manufacture five years of security analyst goodwill. This is the asset versus tool distinction applied to brand. The technology is a tool. The community is the asset.
The Honest Risk
None of this is without difficulty. Five hundred hires at speed is an operational stress test. Culture dilutes when headcount doubles. The people who built the product and the culture in years one through five will be a minority within two years of this hiring plan completing. Founders who have navigated that transition successfully tend to be obsessive about codifying values early, before the new hires arrive, not after.
There is also the AI platform timing risk. Moving from workflow automation to agentic AI is a product bet as much as a market bet. If enterprise buyers are not ready to trust AI agents with security decisions, Tines has built ahead of demand. The history of enterprise software is littered with products that were right and early in a market that was not yet ready to buy them.
What the Rest of Irish Tech Should Take From This
Growth chosen over exit is not a moral statement. It is a different theory of value creation. Tines is betting that a large, independent security automation company is worth more than an acquihire premium from a US platform vendor. That bet might be right or wrong. What it is not is naive.
The Irish tech ecosystem produces smart founders who get acquired young. Sometimes that is the right call. Sometimes it is the path of least resistance dressed up as strategy. Tines is making the harder choice: staying independent long enough to find out what the company is genuinely capable of building.
Building a billion-euro company from Dublin is not an accident. Choosing to keep building past the point where most would sell: that is the actual story.
