Risotto, a New York-based startup developing help desk automation, has raised $10 million in seed funding. Bonfire Ventures was the perfect partner to lead this remarkable funding round. This funding will further equip the company to continue to develop and deploy its leading edge solutions. These solutions use artificial intelligence to optimize and automate ticketing systems.
This is exactly why CEO Aron Solberg founded Risotto – to connect capabilities of complex AI models with real customer needs. The company has built a deep infrastructure to enable this. The seed round was supported by a notable group of investor names including 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital and Surgepoint Capital.
Risotto has built-in integrations with leading generative AIs including ChatGPT for Enterprise and Gemini. The company’s product is built on a third-party foundation model, focusing on maintaining the reliability of the AI’s non-deterministic nature. This method raises Risotto’s customer inquiry handling efficiency, while allowing automatic management of support tickets.
In a notable success story, Risotto was able to automate 60% of all support tickets for its client, Gusto. Despite this automation, Aron Solberg emphasizes that “with 95% of our customers, humans still solve tickets the traditional way.” This only goes to show that though automation is an important aspect of improving efficiency, the presence of human oversight is still needed in most cases.
Aero, one of Risotto’s clients, shows the importance of ticket management. They’ve got FOUR full-time STAFF just to keep Jira, a widely-used project management tool, managed! Solberg emphasizes the importance of simplifying convoluted existing ticketing systems. He’s convinced that if Risotto’s approach spreads, the industry will become consistently better and more efficient.
“Our special sauce is the prompt libraries, the eval suites, and the thousands and thousands of real-world examples that the AI gets trained on to ensure it actually does what it’s expected to do,” Solberg stated. This combined training method is designed to achieve the highest possible effectiveness and reliability from the AI before entering real-world applications.
The recent $2.9 million seed round funding– co-led by Innospark Ventures —fully empowers Risotto to test its theories on automating ticketing processes even more. It helps guarantee appropriate boundaries between technology and human interaction. If Risotto’s innovations prove successful, they would represent major advancements throughout the help desk automation industry.