Tines seeks to tame ‘wild code’ AI sprawl

Every company now has an AI problem that has nothing to do with chatbots hallucinating. It's the pile of scripts, agents, and mini-apps that employees have quietly built using AI tools, connected to real company systems, with zero paper trail. Tines is calling this "Wild Code," and on Tuesday the Dublin-based workflow company launched a product, Tines 3B, built specifically to hunt it down and rein it in.

The numbers behind the problem are not subtle. IBM surveyed 2,000 tech executives across 33 countries in June and found 77% admitting their AI adoption had already blown past their ability to govern it. Tines CEO Eoin Hinchy frames the shift bluntly: building software has gotten almost trivially easy thanks to AI, so the real bottleneck now is knowing what's connected to what, who's accountable for it, and whether any of it can be trusted with production data and credentials.

3B tries to solve that three ways. Describe a workflow in plain English and it gets built, but only against systems and data the organization has explicitly authorized — no wandering off into unapproved territory. Once deployed, it runs with credential protection and isolated execution, and it's supposed to self-heal when it hits situations its original builder never planned for. Every single step executes in its own throwaway environment, then vanishes, which Tines says makes contamination between runs or users structurally impossible rather than just against policy.

The third leg is visibility, and this is arguably the more interesting bet: 3B doesn't just want to be where you build things, it wants to be the console where you watch everything, including automations built somewhere else entirely with a different coding assistant. That's a governance pitch more than a productivity pitch, and it's clearly resonating — Emanuele Sparvoli, IT director at Fin (the company that used to be Intercom), said the credential controls and monitoring were the deciding factor in adopting 3B just weeks ago.

Tines isn't a scrappy startup flying blind here. Founded in 2018 by Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella, it now counts Coinbase, SAP, Reddit, Notion, and Mars among its customers, has tripled its enterprise base year over year, and posts a 124% net revenue retention with 59% weekly active user return — figures that look more like a consumer app than typical enterprise software. Goldman Sachs led its $125 million Series C in February 2025 at a $1.125 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $272 million. The older platform, Tines Stories, isn't going anywhere; 3B is a bet on a new category rather than a replacement.