Risotto Raises $10M Seed for AI-Powered IT Support
Risotto, which uses AI to automatically resolve IT support tickets, has raised a $10 million seed round, according to TechCrunch. Bonfire Ventures led the round, with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and Surgepoint Capital. Pioneer Fund, Ritual, and Orange Collective backed the company at the pre-seed.
The YC W24 company connects ticket management systems like Jira to the internal tooling needed to resolve them. With payroll company Gusto, Risotto automated 60% of support tickets.
The three co-founders have deep roots together. Aron Solberg (CEO), Alex Confer, and Chris Paul first met almost a decade ago as early employees at HelloSign (YC W11), which was later acquired by Dropbox. Confer went on to lead IT engineering at Gusto, while Paul spent years as a senior engineer at Square. Solberg moved into product management, eventually becoming a Director of PM at Dropbox and later leading ML product at Grammarly.
The product is built on a third-party foundation model, but Solberg told TechCrunch that the core of the business is the infrastructure that sits between the model and the customer.
"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."
Risotto is also positioning itself for a shift in how help desks function. While most customers still have humans solving tickets the traditional way, Solberg says newer companies are moving toward having an LLM as the primary interface. The team has already built integrations with ChatGPT for Enterprise and Gemini over MCP.
In the meantime, there's still plenty of value in simplifying existing IT systems. "One of our customers has four full-time employees just to manage Jira," Solberg says. "And that's to say nothing about implementing AI."