Risotto, an AI-powered help desk automation startup, just raised $10 million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures, with backing from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and Surgepoint Capital. The company's already proving its chops with clients like Gusto, where it knocked out 60% of support tickets automatically. As giants like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Freshworks dominate the billion-dollar help desk market, Risotto's betting that AI-first infrastructure will crack open the door for newcomers to reshape how IT support actually works.
Risotto just landed $10 million to bet big on a simple premise: nobody should need four full-time employees just to manage Jira. The AI help desk automation startup announced its seed round Tuesday, led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and Surgepoint Capital, according to TechCrunch.
Help desk automation is a billion-dollar industry, and one of the ripest targets for AI disruption. Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Freshworks currently own the market, but the AI wave is giving smaller players like Risotto an opening to reimagine the entire workflow from scratch.
The company sits in the messy middle - between ticket management systems like Jira and the complex internal tooling IT teams need to actually resolve issues. Built on a third-party foundation model, Risotto's real innovation isn't the AI itself but the infrastructure wrapped around it. CEO Aron Solberg calls it the company's "special sauce" - prompt libraries, evaluation suites, and thousands of real-world training examples that keep the non-deterministic nature of large language models from going sideways.
