Risotto raises $10 million to use artificial intelligence to make ticketing systems easier to use

Help desk automation is a billion-dollar industry, and one of the industries most likely to be disrupted by AI-based technology. Major players like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Freshworks currently dominate the space, but many smaller startups are betting that rearranging workflows will give them a chance to scale back.

Rizzuto is one of those startups, and after today, it will have plenty of runway 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 independently resolve help desk ticket issues, and sits between ticket management systems like Jira and the complex internal tools needed to resolve them. The product is built on a third-party enterprise model, but CEO Aaron Solberg says the core of the business is the infrastructure that sits between the model and the customer, keeping the non-deterministic nature of the model under control.

“Our special sauce is the instant 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 is expected of it,” Solberg told TechCrunch.

Working with payroll company Gusto, Risotto was able to automate 60% of the company’s support tickets. Its current work focuses on traditional ticketing systems, but Risotto is also positioning itself for a more radical shift in the industry, as artificial intelligence drives more fundamental changes in the way help desks operate.

“With 95% of our customers, humans still solve tickets the traditional way,” Solberg said. “But we’re seeing newer companies shift to where the primary interface between humans and technology is the MBA.”

In practice, this means that tasks are managed through tools like ChatGPT for Enterprise, which coordinates help desk tickets along with a host of other business tasks. Solberg says his team has already worked on integrations with ChatGPT for Enterprise and Gemini, connecting Risotto via MCP.

If this approach becomes more common, it will mean big changes for the industry as a whole. Risotto and similar products will act as tools that can be called upon by central AI, providing a more focused and reliable service than a general-purpose system could perform on its own. It’s a new paradigm for thinking about SaaS products — one in which reliability and context management are more important than human-friendly interfaces.

Meanwhile, Risotto’s most immediate value comes from taming the chaos caused by its various IT systems. As Solberg sees it, there is still a lot of value in making existing ticketing systems easier to use.

“One of our clients only has four full-time employees running Jira,” Solberg says. “This is to say nothing about the application of artificial intelligence. This is just to create controversy about the platform itself.”