Risotto raises $10M in seed funding to use AI to create easy-to-use ticketing solutions

Help desk automation is a multi-billion dollar industry, and one of the things that could be disrupted is technology built on AI. Big players like Zendesk, ServiceNow and Freshworks currently dominate the space, but many smaller startups are betting that streamlining workflows will give them a competitive edge.

Risotto is one of the first, and when it goes today, it will have a lot of way to test its ideas. The company on Tuesday said it raised $10 million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and Surgepoint Capital.

Designed to automatically resolve support tickets, Risotto sits between ticket management systems like Jira and the complex internal tools required to resolve them. The product is built on the basis of a third party, but CEO Aron Solberg says that the basis of the business is the infrastructure that sits between the model and the customer, and ensures that the model is not known.

“Our special sauce is fast libraries, eval suites, and thousands of real examples that the AI ​​is trained on to make sure it’s doing what it’s expected to do,” Solberg told TechCrunch.

Working with a paid company TasteRisotto was able to capture 60% of the company’s support tickets. His current work is focused on conventional systems, but Risotto is also positioning himself to revolutionize the industry, as AI drives significant changes in help desk operations.

“With 95% of our customers, people still cancel tickets in the traditional way,” Solberg said. “But we’re seeing new companies transitioning from a basic human-technology to an LLM.”

In practice, this may mean that services are managed by tools such as ChatGPT for Enterprise, which integrates help desk tickets with various other services. Solberg says his team has already been working on integration with ChatGPT for Enterprise and Gemini, connecting Risotto on MCP.

If the approach becomes more widespread, it could mean major changes for the entire industry. Risotto and similar products can function as tools that can be called by a central AI, providing a more stable and reliable service than a general-purpose system can do on its own. It’s a new paradigm for thinking about SaaS products – where reliability and product management are more important than a user-friendly interface.

Meanwhile, Risotto’s value proposition comes from managing the chaos of various IT systems. As Solberg sees it, there is more value in making it easier to use existing systems.

“One of our customers has four employees who just manage Jira,” says Solberg. “And that doesn’t say anything about implementing AI. This is just a fight against the platform itself.”