Tintri was founded in 2008 by Kieran Harty, who had led development at VMware as their executive vice president of engineering from 1999 to 2006. A native of Ireland, Harty had graduate degrees from Trinity College, Dublin and Stanford University. The initial objective for the company was solving the mismatch between conventional storage and the demands of applications in virtual machine (VM) environments, which causes complex configuration and management as well as over-provisioning. Over time, the company has expanded its focus to also address the cloud needs of enterprise customers. Tintri means “lightning” in the Gaelic language.

Early investors includ ed David Cheriton (Harty’s Ph.D. adviser) and venture capital from New Enterprise Associates and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The first two rounds raised about $17 million before being disclosed in 2011. Another round of about $25 million was disclosed in July, 2012, with Menlo Ventures as additional investor. Pete Sonsini, (son of Silicon Valley attorney Larry Sonsini) was an early board member. In October 2013, Ken Klein, a Tintri board member and former president of Wind River Systems, became chairman and chief executive. Ian Halifax, also from Wind River, was named chief financial officer in January 2014.

A round of $75 million investment in February 2014 was led by Insight Venture Partners. In August 2015, a $125 million investment round was led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk joined by previous investors. In October, 2016, Charles Giancarlo (from Silver Lake) joined the board of directors.

On June 1, 2017, Tintri filed with the SEC for an initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange.