Moveworks Funding Fuels AI, IT Service Desk Automation -

Moveworks has raised $75 million in Series B funding to accelerate the company's IT support automation business. MSPs, IT service management (ITSM) and help desk providers should pay particularly close attention to this type of funding.

The reason: The resulting artificial intelligence (AI) and automation software could disrupt existing IT support business models. MSPs that hold tight to traditional IT service desk systems and manual labor could face long-term disruption, ChannelE2E believes.

The new funding arrives only a few months after a $30 million Series A round surfaced earlier this year.

New Moveworks investors ICONIQ Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Sapphire Ventures.Existing investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Comerica Bank. The round also included a personal investment from John W. Thompson, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and chairman of Microsoft.

Moveworks: IT Support Meets AI, Natural Language Understanding

Moveworks develops Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and conversational-AI technology.

Early adopters include Broadcom, Western Digital, Medallia, Autodesk and Nutanix. Those companies resolve 30 percent to 40 percent of their daily IT support issues autonomously with Moveworks' advanced machine learning, conversational-AI and NLU platform, the startup claims.

More recent adopters include Align Technology, LinkedIn, Symantec, Belkin, Stitch Fix, and Cisco AppDynamics. Revenue is growing 300 percent year-over-year, though actual dollar figures were not disclosed.

In a prepared statement about the business and funding, Kleiner Perkins Partner Mamoon Hamid said:

"Moveworks has become the clear market leader in IT support automation, yet in many ways the company is still in its first inning. I've been tracking Moveworks from the moment they signed their first customer and we believe it has the potential to become the main interaction model for a broader set of enterprise workflows. We're thrilled to partner with the Moveworks team — IT support is just the start."

Explaining the road ahead, Moveworks CEO Bhavin Shah said:

"Building Moveworks over the past three years has been an exercise in discipline and focus. The possibilities of AI are so vast that many start-ups get trapped by the allure of solving every problem their customers present to them. We chose to focus on a single problem that's been holding IT support back for the last 30 years: resolving IT tickets, quickly and with minimal disruption to employees' day-to-day jobs. We focused AI on deeply understanding enterprise IT support tickets to solve this very difficult problem. And we've succeeded."

IT Service Desks and MSP Automation

We’ll be watching to see if or when Moveworks potentially extends its vision into the midmarket and SMB sectors.

ChannelE2E has repeatedly pointed out that the MSP market, in particular, has been slow to sort out opportunities in artificial intelligence and chatbots for further business automation.

Still, some new solutions in the area surfaced at IT Nation Connect 2019 earlier this month in Orlando, Florida. Key names to know include:

Invarosoft, which launched ITSupportBot at the conference.

Liongard, which helps MSPs to automate a range of tasks.

Triafy, launched by ConnectWise veteran Gerwai Todd, focuses on ticket triage automation without forcing MSPs to rip-and-replace their existing help desk platforms.