Risotto raises $10M seed to use AI to make ticketing systems easier to use

Helpdesk automation is a multi-billion dollar industry and one of the sectors most likely to be disrupted by AI-enabled technology. Big players like Zendesk, ServiceNow and Freshworks currently dominate the market, but many smaller startups are betting that reshuffling workflows will give them the opportunity to intervene.

Risotto is one of those startups, and after today it will have plenty of opportunity to test its theory. The company said Tuesday it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital and Surgepoint Capital.

Risotto is designed to resolve helpdesk tickets autonomously, sitting between ticket management systems like Jira and the complex internal tools required to resolve them. The product is built on a basic third-party model, but CEO Aron Solberg says the core of the business is the infrastructure that sits between the model and the customer, keeping the model’s non-deterministic nature in check.

“Our special sauce is the prompt libraries, the evaluation suites, and the thousands and thousands of real-world examples that the AI ​​is trained on to make sure it actually does what it’s supposed to do,” Solberg told TechCrunch.

Collaborate with the payroll company GustoRisotto was able to automate 60% of the company’s support tickets. The current work focuses on conventional ticketing systems, but Risotto is also positioning itself for a more radical shift in the industry as AI brings more fundamental changes to the way help desks function.

“95% of our customers still resolve tickets in the traditional way,” says Solberg. “But we are seeing the newer companies shifting to an LLM as the primary interface between people and technology.”

In practical terms, this would mean tasks are managed through tools like ChatGPT for Enterprise, which coordinate helpdesk tickets alongside a range of other professional tasks. Solberg says his team has already been working on integrations with ChatGPT for Enterprise and Gemini, connecting Risotto via MCP.

If this approach becomes more common, it would mean significant changes for the industry as a whole. Risotto and similar products would function as tools invoked by a central AI, providing a more targeted and reliable service than a general-purpose system could perform on its own. It’s a new paradigm for thinking about SaaS products – one where reliability and context management are more important than human-friendly interfaces.

Meanwhile, Risotto’s most immediate value proposition comes from taming the mess of disparate IT systems. According to Solberg, there is still a lot of value in making existing ticketing systems easier.

“One of our customers has four full-time employees to manage Jira,” says Solberg. “Not to mention the implementation of AI. That’s just to confuse the platform itself.”