Risotto Raises $10M Seed Round to Simplify Help Desk Ticketing With AI

Help desk automation is a multibillion-dollar market and one of the enterprise software categories most likely to be reshaped by artificial intelligence. Established platforms such as Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Freshworks continue to dominate. Still, a growing number of startups believe that rethinking workflows — rather than replacing systems outright — can create room for disruption.

Risotto is betting on that approach. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, with additional backing from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, and SurgePoint Capital. The funding gives the startup a runway to expand its AI-driven approach to resolving help desk tickets.

Risotto is designed to autonomously handle support requests by operating between traditional ticketing platforms like Jira and the complex internal tools used to resolve them. While the system relies on third-party foundation models, CEO Aron Solberg said the company’s core value lies in the infrastructure layer that sits between the AI model and the customer, ensuring reliability and predictability.

“Our differentiation comes from the prompt libraries, evaluation frameworks, and the thousands of real-world examples the system is trained on,” Solberg told. “That’s what allows the AI to behave consistently and do what customers expect.”

One early customer, payroll company Gusto, has used Risotto to automate roughly 60% of its incoming support tickets. While most deployments today still revolve around conventional ticketing systems, Risotto is also preparing for a broader shift in how enterprise support operates as AI adoption accelerates.

“About 95% of our customers still rely on humans solving tickets in the traditional way,” Solberg said. “But newer companies are starting to treat large language models as the primary interface between people and their tools.”

In practice, that could mean support tasks managed through platforms such as ChatGPT for Enterprise, where ticket resolution is coordinated alongside other professional workflows. Solberg said Risotto has already built integrations with ChatGPT for Enterprise and Google’s Gemini, connecting through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

If that model becomes widespread, it could reshape the help desk industry. Rather than serving as standalone applications, products like Risotto would function as specialised tools called by a central AI system, delivering more reliable, context-aware results than general-purpose models alone. It represents a shift in SaaS thinking, prioritising reliability and orchestration over traditional user interfaces.

For now, Risotto’s near-term focus remains on simplifying existing systems. Solberg said many companies struggle not because of a lack of automation, but because of the operational overhead of managing their own ticketing platforms.

“One customer has four full-time employees whose job is just to manage Jira,” he said. “That’s before you even start thinking about AI. It’s simply about making these systems usable.”