Risotto raised $10 million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures to scale its autonomous AI helpdesk platform that resolves internal support tickets directly within Slack, with participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, SurgePoint Capital, and former executives from Dropbox and HelloSign. The San Francisco-based startup founded in 2023 by former HelloSign and Dropbox employees already helps enterprise customers including Gusto, Jobber, ThoughtSpot, and Ironclad save thousands of hours monthly by automating tier-one support requests that traditionally consume IT team bandwidth.
Aron Solberg, co-founder and CEO, emphasized that Risotto represents fundamental reimagining rather than incremental improvement of ticketing systems. The platform builds an autonomous agent that plugs into existing corporate infrastructure, understands contextual nuances, performs complex horizontal enterprise workflows, and enables support teams across IT, HR, and RevOps to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives rather than repetitive ticket resolution.
The founding team brings over 30 years collective experience in enterprise B2B SaaS software. Alex Confer led IT teams at HelloSign through its Dropbox acquisition and later directed IT engineering at Gusto, experiencing firsthand the operational pain points Risotto addresses. Chris Paul spent 25 years in software engineering including staff positions at Square. Solberg transitioned from early engineering roles at HelloSign to product management at Dropbox and machine learning product leadership at Grammarly before founding Risotto to build the IT product Confer always wanted but could never find.
Most enterprises still run internal support on systems designed before modern SaaS proliferation and AI capabilities emerged. Employees navigate between portals, forms, and email threads just to reset passwords or obtain software access. Support teams spend days triaging redundant questions, chasing context across fragmented systems, and managing brittle workflows in legacy ITSM tools built for 1990s operational models rather than contemporary distributed work environments.
Risotto delivers a unified AI-powered support funnel integrating across core enterprise systems including communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, ticketing systems like Jira, Freshservice, and ServiceNow, knowledge repositories like Notion, Confluence, and SharePoint, and identity providers like Okta and Google Workspace. The platform sits between ticket management systems and the complex internal tooling required to resolve requests, keeping the non-deterministic nature of foundation models in check through proprietary infrastructure.
Jose Izquierdo, Senior Director of IT at Gusto, confirmed that before Risotto his team was buried in tier-one support requests. Now Risotto autosolves 60 percent of monthly support tickets, employees receive answers in chat within seconds, the queue has shrunk dramatically, and his team finally has time for projects that advance business objectives. The platform saves Gusto thousands of hours monthly.
Jim Andelman, co-founder and managing director at Bonfire Ventures, stated that internal support still runs on tools built before modern AI capabilities existed. Risotto represents the first company effectively automating the messy real-world IT queue at true enterprise scale. Early results from customers like Gusto achieving 60 percent automation and Jobber rolling out across 12 departments demonstrate potential to fundamentally change how every company operates helpdesk functions.
The seed funding will accelerate product development, expand enterprise sales, and support team growth as Risotto scales its autonomous support platform across additional departments and use cases beyond IT including HR, RevOps, and other internal support functions requiring similar automation capabilities.
