Investing in Treeline
a16z leads Treeline's Series A
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
IT, as defined by pop culture, is a dark room and someone hacking their way through a crisis. In reality, modern IT means managing devices, access, security, compliance, and support – continuously, invisibly, and at scale. It’s one of the most operationally demanding functions in any business, as any founder or operations lead will tell you. Because of the constant demands of the role, more than 80% of U.S. businesses outsource this mission-critical function to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) - specialized services firms that function as an external IT and security department.
The MSP market is the backbone of the US tech economy. MSPs collectively generate over $200B in annual revenue across roughly 40,000 independent businesses. As technology becomes more central to how every business runs, the need for someone to manage it has only deepened.
The vast majority of MSPs are small, lifestyle companies that deliver service the same way they always have – reacting to tickets and providing labor augmentation. But something important has changed. Advances in software and AI are making it possible to reimagine this model that historically required greater headcount for greater impact.
Enter Treeline – a team of engineers and operators building the AI-enabled IT services provider. To reinvent this legacy model and better service customers at scale, Treeline built a software layer that sits at the center of IT operations, standardizing workflows, automating routine work, and turning every resolved issue into an insight that makes the system smarter. The result is IT that gets more efficient over time – noticing patterns, addressing root causes, and bringing humans in where expertise matters.
Treeline has integrated leading MSPs into its offering in order to offer the market both world-class software and deep industry expertise. What’s different about the Treeline model, however, is that they aren’t just an “AI rollup.” Treeline’s platform completely reimagines how partner MSPs operate. Automated workflows dramatically reduce ticket response times, technicians offer white-glove support, and their broad product offering allows their customers to be forward thinking in ways traditionally reserved for the F100. All of this represents something the IT industry hasn’t seen before: leading human expertise and modern software, finally built into a single operating model.
Working with Treeline has afforded me the great pleasure of working with Peter Doyle and Hussain Kader. Peter and I met a decade ago and when he introduced me to Hussain, his close friend from undergrad at Stanford, it was clear they were the dream pairing to attack this enormous problem.
Investing in Treeline is an incredible full circle moment, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be their partner. Onward!
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