Treeline Secures $25 Million Series A Round For AI-Powered MSP

MSPs have ‘been, at least from the Silicon Valley perspective, hiding in plain sight for a long time,’ Treeline CEO and co-founder Peter Doyle says.

IT services startup Treeline has raised a $25 million Series A round of funding to further develop an MSP business born in the artificial intelligence era that looks to challenge solution providers still operating under decades-old practices.

Storied venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round, which will help San Francisco-based Treeline scale its platform, accelerate product innovation and build out its workforce to take on the 40,000-plus MSPs in the U.S, Peter Doyle, Treeline’s CEO who co-founded the startup in 2024, told CRN in an interview.

MSPs have “been, at least from the Silicon Valley perspective, hiding in plain sight for a long time,” said Doyle (pictured above). “We’re setting out to try to build what we perceive to be the modern or next generation service provider model where we still have technicians, expertise, humans in the loop.”

Treeline Series A

Joe Schmidt, a partner at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Andreessen, told CRN in an interview that he’s known Doyle for more than 10 years and saw a major market in small and midsize business IT services ripe for disruption and seeking a better approach than the roll-up playbook of private equity firms buying software vendors.

“It is the way that many of the largest software companies in the world distribute their products,” Schmidt said. “It is the way that small and midsized businesses get their IT services.”

Schmidt has been with Andreessen for about five years, according to his LinkedIn account. Investments he has worked on with the firm include digital worker creator 11x, insurance technology provider FurtherAI and retail operations technology provider Glimpse.

While investment firms are perhaps better known for investing in software vendors with higher margins than the human capital intensive world of MSPs, Schmidt said that he’s comfortable with Treeline’s approach of augmenting human technicians to save time on high-volume, time-consuming efforts with password resets, onboarding, offboarding and other IT tasks and instead focusing on more complex tasks around strategic planning, security and working in highly regulated environments.

“Humans are mission critical,” he said. “But they (Treeline) also have great professionals that are not bogged down by the rest of the mundane road inertia.”

Treeline’s business model also brings a level of quality control compared to software vendors that give up the implementation, architecture and data captured by last-mile solution providers.

“We have all of that,” Schmidt said. “We have an amazing engineering team that’s saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to just continuously compound and make this better and better and better for our customers. And that end-to-end ownership is really critical.”

Doyle said that Andreessen investing in Treeline gives the firm a unique opportunity to see how a services business model works for modernizing industries and serving end customers compared to the usual VC-friendly SaaS model–whose future in a world of Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI tool creators has caused concern for traditional SaaS investors.

Treeline’s AI Agents

Treeline positions its AI tooling and agents as capable of augmenting or directly resolving 98 percent of customer-submitted requests and increasing employee onboarding speed tenfold, from 20 minutes to two. Treeline can also reduce error rates by 95 percent for tickets solved within its platform.

The company has around 200 customers and about 70 employees today. The company should hit at least threefold revenue growth this year. The company is profitable. “I’m able to confidently say these lofty growth numbers just because we’re hearing from the market that what we’re putting in front of folks is really resonating,” he said.

The platform Treeline has built brings together fully automated employee and asset lifecycle, device and identity management, endpoint security, vulnerability management, insider threat protection, security questionnaire completion, compliance readiness process management, audit preparation, framework and audit exploration and consultation and other functions MSPs tend to provide end customers.

Key to Treeline’s success is a centralized software layer known as “the modern IT operating system.” The company leverages this system to automate manual work and standardize workflow across IT, security and compliance instead of stitching together tools and vendors.

Human employees are freed up for architecture, high-impact decisions and judgment calls on more complex matters than lower-tier IT support, Doyle said.

Although in the beginning he thought Treeline could automate away almost every manual IT service provider task, his focus has turned to saving technicians time from lower-tier support tickets so they can concentrate on errorless work in complex IT environments. Treeline’s investment in documentation, data harmony and context augmentation for improving AI accuracy is key for applying automation to those lower-level tasks, Doyle said.

“I don’t want customers to just be like, ‘Oh, now we’re talking to AI,’” he said. “I don’t think things are there yet. Nor will they be there for a long time. They should still have that white glove support. But behind the scenes, we can just clean a lot of really complex processes up (and then) free up technicians for more interesting, higher value work.”

Nor will Treeline seek to displace software vendors making complicated mobile device management (MDM), endpoint detection and response (EDR) and other tools MSPs rely on.

“We just built good infrastructure, data services, plumbing,” he said. “We could have gone in, day one, and scripted a bunch of things and put out some agents. But that’s not scalable. I don’t think that’s very differentiating.”

Some of Treeline’s closest vendor partners for now include Microsoft, Google, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne

CEO Has VC Origins

Doyle started Treeline after about nine years with Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm Accel.

During his time with Accel, he helped source and lead investments in cloud-based incident management platform provider PagerDuty, enterprise Kubernetes company Heptio, facilities maintenance management platform vendor ServiceChannel and others, according to a profile on Accel’s website.

PagerDuty went public in 2019, raising about $218 million. VMware acquired Heptio in 2018 for about $550 million. Fortive acquired ServiceChannel in 2021 for about $1.2 billion.

Joining Doyle at Treeline is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Hussain Kader. The CTO previously worked at Brex for about three years, leaving the finance platform provider with the title of senior software engineer. His resume includes about five years with Menlo Security, leaving in 2020 with the same title, according to his LinkedIn account.

Another notable member of Treeline’s C-suite is Jeff Gaines as chief growth officer. Gaines previously served as senior vice president of growth at Lyra Technology Group and was CEO of solution provider Interlaced, according to his LinkedIn account.