Help desk automation is a billion-dollar industry and one of the industries most likely to be disrupted by technology built on AI. While giants like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Freshworks currently dominate the space, many small startups are betting that reorganizing workflows will give them a chance to break in.
Risotto is one such startup and will have plenty of runway to test its theory after today. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and Surgepoint Capital.
Risotto is designed to resolve help desk tickets autonomously, sitting between ticket management systems like Jira and the complex internal tools needed to resolve tickets. Although the product is built on a third-party underlying model, CEO Aaron Solberg says the core of the business is the infrastructure that sits between the model and the customer and constrains the non-deterministic nature of the model.
“Our special sauce is a prompt library, an evaluation suite, and thousands of real-world examples that are trained to ensure that the AI actually does what is expected of it,” Solberg told TechCrunch.
Working with payroll company Gusto, Risotto was able to automate 60% of the company’s support tickets. While current efforts focus on traditional ticketing systems, Risotto is positioning itself for a more fundamental shift in the industry as AI drives a more fundamental shift in how help desks function.
“For 95% of our customers, humans still resolve tickets the traditional way,” Solberg says. “However, we are seeing startups transition to making LLMs the primary interface between humans and technology.”
In practice, this means that tasks are managed through tools like ChatGPT for Enterprise. This tool coordinates help desk tickets alongside a variety of other professional tasks. Solberg says his team is already working on integration with ChatGPT for Enterprise and Gemini, and connecting Risotto via MCP.
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If this approach becomes more common, it would represent a major shift for the industry as a whole. Risotto and similar products act as tools invoked by a central AI to provide more focused and reliable services than general-purpose systems can perform on their own. This is a new paradigm for thinking about SaaS products, one where reliability and context management are more important than human-friendly interfaces.
In the meantime, Risotto’s most immediate value proposition comes from reducing disruption to various IT systems. In Solberg’s view, there is still a lot of value in making existing ticketing systems easier to use.
“One of our customers has four full-time employees solely responsible for managing Jira,” says Solberg. “Not to mention the implementation of AI. That just disrupts the platform itself.”
