Risotto: $10 million so you never write to tech support again

Remember that sticky feeling of helplessness when your VPN drops or corporate email gets blocked in the middle of a workday? You file a ticket in Jira or ServiceNow, and all you get is an automated notification that your request number 4582 has been received and will be reviewed within 24 hours. In a world where neural networks write code and generate video, such slowness seems not just anachronistic, but a real mockery of common sense. This is the problem Risotto, a startup that just raised $10 million, is trying to solve — transforming IT support from bureaucratic hell into an invisible background process.

The history of corporate support is a journey from phone calls to endless email chains and finally to modern messengers like Slack. But even the shift to chat didn't solve the main problem: on the other end of the line sits an overwhelmed human who manually performs the same routine tasks over and over. After decades of attempting to automate this process with rigid scripts and primitive buttons, the industry has finally gained a tool capable of understanding context. Risotto doesn't just redirect requests — it assumes the role of an autonomous agent that understands human language and has access to a company's internal tools.

A $10 million seed round looks quite solid, especially now when venture capital has become much more cautious. Lead investor Bonfire Ventures is clearly betting that the era of heavyweight ITSM systems (IT Service Management) is coming to an end. The essence of Risotto's approach lies in deep integration: the system lives where people are accustomed to communicating and learns from existing knowledge bases and logs of past requests. This allows it not just to say "check the instructions," but to actually perform actions — changing access rights, resetting passwords, or helping configure specific software.

Why does this matter right now? We're witnessing a global shift from "AI assistants" that merely give advice to "AI agents" that perform work. For large businesses, this is a colossal saving. Maintaining a huge staff of junior system administrators is expensive, and turnover in these positions is enormous due to burnout and monotonous tasks. If Risotto can take on even 70% of typical requests, it will completely change the economics of IT departments. Moreover, companies don't need to implement new complex interfaces — employees continue writing in familiar Slack, often without even realizing an algorithm is helping them.

Of course, the field is already crowded. Giants like ServiceNow are actively integrating generative AI into their products, and competitors like Moveworks or Glean aren't standing still either. However, the advantage of small players like Risotto lies in their flexibility and focus on "autonomy" from day one. While large corporations try to bolt neural networks onto their old, monstrous platforms, newcomers are building processes around AI as the central core. This is the classic David versus Goliath story, where David's side has modern language models and freedom from technical debt.

What does this mean for us? Most likely, the profession of first-level IT support employee will soon disappear entirely. People who spent years explaining how to reboot a router will be replaced by systems that do it in a second. This will free up human resources for genuinely complex architectural tasks and security. And we won't have to wait hours anymore for someone to press that sacred button in the admin panel.

Bottom line: Risotto is trying to kill the very concept of "waiting for operator response," turning IT support into an instant function. Will the startup survive in the shadow of ServiceNow, or is acquisition by one of the giants in the next couple of years awaiting it?