Risotto raises $10 million to automate help desk ticketing

On Tuesday, Risotto announced that it has raised a $10 million seed funding round. The investment was led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and SurgePoint Capital. The startup raised the capital to scale its help desk automation platform.

Risotto automates help desk tickets—or customer support requests—by utilizing third-party foundation models, which are large-scale artificial intelligence models. In a practical application, the startup automated 60% of support tickets for the payroll company Gusto. To manage the non-deterministic, or unpredictable, behavior of these underlying models, Risotto relies on its specific infrastructure. Solberg told TechCrunch that the company’s core value lies in its prompt libraries, evaluation suites, and thousands of real-world training examples that ensure the AI performs as expected.

While the startup is building for an AI-centric future, adoption remains highly traditional. Solberg stated that with 95% of Risotto’s customers, humans still solve tickets the traditional way. However, the company is positioning itself for a broader industry shift where large language models (LLMs) become the primary interface for help desk tasks. Under this approach, tasks would be managed through platforms like ChatGPT for Enterprise and Gemini, which would call specialized tools like Risotto to resolve specific tickets. If this approach of using LLMs as a primary interface becomes more common, it would mean significant changes for the software industry, shifting the focus from human-friendly user interfaces to backend reliability and context management.

In the near term, Risotto aims to reduce the heavy administrative burden of existing systems. Solberg highlighted the complexity of managing platforms like Jira, a widely used ticket management system. “One of our customers has four full-time employees just to manage Jira,” said Solberg, the CEO of Risotto. He noted that this effort is spent simply wrangling the platform itself, without even beginning to implement AI.

Why it matters

Risotto is betting that reshuffling workflows in the help desk automation industry will give it a chance to compete with major players like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Freshworks.