In the modern enterprise, the “Help Desk” has long been the place where productivity goes to die. Despite billions of dollars poured into digital transformation, the process of getting a password reset or requesting software access still feels remarkably like 1998: a labyrinth of portals, “no-reply” email threads, and the inevitable three-day wait for a human to click a single button.
But if you ask Aron Solberg, the CEO of San Francisco-based Risotto, the era of the “waiting for a ticket” is officially over.
Risotto announced today that it has raised $10 million in seed funding to turn the traditional IT help desk into an autonomous, AI-driven engine. The round was led by Bonfire Ventures, with a heavy-hitting roster of participants including 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, Surgepoint Capital, and a group of angel investors consisting of former executives from Dropbox and HelloSign.
The “SaaS Sprawl” Crisis
The problem Risotto is solving is one of volume and fragmentation. As companies have adopted more specialized software, moving from a few monolithic programs to a “stack” of hundreds of SaaS tools, the internal support burden has exploded. IT and HR teams now spend the majority of their time on “Tier-1” requests: repetitive, low-complexity tasks that keep them from high-value strategic work.
“Most companies still run internal support on systems designed before today’s SaaS sprawl,” says Solberg. “Employees bounce between portals and forms just to get basic access. It’s frustrating for the employee and exhausting for the support team.”
Risotto’s platform acts as an autonomous “connective tissue” across an enterprise’s entire stack. By integrating with communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, identity providers like Okta, and legacy ITSM tools like ServiceNow or Jira, Risotto doesn’t just “chat” with employees, it actually does the work.
From Chatbot to Autonomous Agent
What separates Risotto from the “clippy-style” chatbots of the last decade is its ability to take action. While legacy tools often “bolt on” AI to summarize tickets, Risotto is AI-native. It uses advanced reasoning to gather context, troubleshoot issues using screenshots, and execute workflows across multiple departments.
The results are hard to ignore:
- Gusto, the payroll giant, has already used Risotto to autosolve 60% of their monthly support tickets.
- Jobber is currently scaling the platform across 12 different departments.
- The platform is consistently hitting 70% ticket automation for its enterprise clients.
“Before Risotto, our team was buried,” says Jose Izquierdo, Senior Director of IT at Gusto. “Now, our queue is dramatically smaller, and my team finally has time for projects that move the business forward.”
Built by the People Who Lived the Problem
Risotto’s founding team isn’t just building a trendy AI tool; they are “operators” who spent decades in the trenches of high-growth tech companies.
- Aron Solberg (CEO): An engineering and product veteran from HelloSign and Dropbox, who most recently served as an enterprise lead at Grammarly.
- Alex Confer (CIO): The former head of IT at HelloSign and Dropbox, who later oversaw IT Engineering at Gusto.
- Chris Paul (CTO): A staff software engineer with 25 years of experience, including a significant tenure at Square.
This “built-by-IT-for-IT” pedigree is what caught the eye of investors. “Risotto is the first company we’ve seen that effectively automates the messy, real-world IT queue at true enterprise scale,” says Jim Andelman, Co-founder and Managing Director at Bonfire Ventures.
The Road Ahead
With $10 million in the bank, Risotto plans to expand its engineering team and accelerate its push into the broader “Enterprise Service Management” (ESM) market. The goal isn’t just to fix IT, but to automate every internal “ask”, whether it’s a payroll question for HR or a provisioning request for RevOps.
Enterprises can learn more at https://www.tryrisotto.com/.
