January 27, 2026
Internal support is the silent tax on every company. Every time an employee needs access to an app, help with a frozen laptop, has a question about benefits, needs a contract review, or has a commission question, someone on the other end has to stop what they’re doing, decipher the request, and work through a multi-step process to resolve it. At scale, these small moments add up to millions of hours of lost productivity - and a staggering amount of operational drag.
For decades, the category meant to fix this - IT Service Management - has relied on systems that were never built for modern internal workflows. Companies have been forced into tools originally designed for customer service or project management, while the real work still falls on overworked IT, HR, legal, and ops teams. Even the “AI” entrants before 2023 focused mostly on deflection: pointing employees to articles instead of actually solving their issue.
Risotto flips that model on its head.
Our introduction came through an angel in our network - someone who consistently surfaces great early teams. A few days later, Jim got a note from a founder he backed almost a decade ago, now an angel in Risotto’s post-YC round. His message was simple: “This team is the real deal. No drama. All execution.”
When trusted friends who’ve worked with a founding team for years volunteer that kind of endorsement, we listen.
Alex, Chris, and Aron have a long shared history. They were early employees at HelloSign before it was acquired by Dropbox, and continued building together at Dropbox and separately at Square, Gusto, Grammarly and others. This is a team that has seen internal support systems from inside some of the best-run, most operationally-minded companies in tech. They’ve lived the pain, especially Alex, who was head of internal IT at four high-growth companies, including Gusto.
The breakthrough came as agentic frameworks and LLMs matured. For the first time, it was possible not just to route tickets, but to resolve them automatically, inside the interfaces employees already use, with no manual programming and no heavy implementation.
The category couldn’t be more primed for change. ServiceNow, the legacy system of record, is a $170B company. The broader ITSM market is expected to grow from $15B to $30B in five years. And the labor spent resolving internal requests is a $50B+ problem on its own.
Internal support is e-commerce customer service all over again, but no one has built the equivalent of a true AI-native layer.
Risotto is doing exactly that.
Rather than relying on deflection, Risotto resolves internal tickets better and faster than humans can, and in many cases, without humans at all.
The platform can:
For one customer, Risotto is automatically resolving 90% of tickets. In typical deployments, they consistently drive 30–60% auto-resolution, and the rest get routed or completed faster.
It’s human effort replacement in the areas where humans least want to spend their time.
During diligence, we saw one of the most impressive early customer lineups we’ve ever encountered for a company at this stage. Their roster already included Superhuman, Ironclad, Gusto, Medium, Jobber, Vidyard, Trust & Will, ThoughtSpot, and Fundrise - a who's who of product-forward, operationally demanding companies.
We didn’t just hear strong references. We watched them.
Risotto had a data room full of recorded customer testimonials and unsolicited clips of teams raving about the speed of implementation, the customer obsession, and the quality of the product, the pace of new feature development, and the value being delivered. Customers told us they’d never worked with a startup team that responded faster, shipped improvements more quickly, or closed the loop with more care.
One buyer described the experience as “night and day compared to legacy tools.”
Another said, “Competitors keep calling, but switching would mean abandoning everything Risotto has already learned.”
This type of learning lock-in is real. Every ticket Risotto resolves teaches the system how to handle the next one. It’s a product that strengthens with usage and becomes harder to replace over time.
The technical strength is obvious. The execution velocity is even clearer. But what stood out most was their character.
Founders who choose to build together again, after having choices and successful careers of their own, tend to bring a level of trust, clarity, and alignment that is rare. When we met them for dinner after issuing the term sheet, that dynamic was unmistakable. They’re collaborative, humble, sharp, and deeply committed to solving a problem they’ve personally lived.
They’re also the kind of founders customers rave about. They listen. They ship fast. They don’t overcomplicate. They do the work.
Risotto already sits on top of existing ticketing systems, but the longer-term opportunity is even bigger. As they continue to refine their agentic layer, the underlying system of record becomes less important - closer to commoditized infrastructure than a competitive moat.
That sets the stage for a future where Risotto isn’t just an AI assistant on top of ITSM…
It performs internal work across functions.
This is a $1bn+ ARR opportunity hiding in plain sight, with the potential to redefine how every company - from 50-person startups to the largest employers in the world - handles internal operations. If everything goes right, Risotto could become the market leader in one of the largest, least modernized categories in enterprise software.
We’re thrilled to partner with Alex, Chris, and Aron as they build toward that future. Read more about Risotto's $10M fundraise in TechCrunch.
