Conversational AI specialist Moveworks has raised $75 million in a Series B financing round, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $105 million, putting a chunky feather in the cap after a blistering 2019 during which it came out of stealth mode.
The company, whose CTO and co-founder Vaibhav Nivargi spoke with Computer Business Review last month, provides a cloud-based AI platform designed for large enterprises that uses AI to resolve employees’ IT support issues.
Moveworks Funding: Microsoft Chairman Dips In…
New investors ICONIQ Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Sapphire Ventures led the round with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Comerica Bank. The round included a personal investment from John W. Thompson, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Chairman of Microsoft.
The new capital will be used to accelerate product innovation for Moveworks’ Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Conversational-AI technology the San Francisco-based startup said in an announcement shared Thursday.
Read this: Five Questions with… Moveworks CTO & Co-founder Vaibhav Nivargi
Mamoon Hamid, partner, Kleiner Perkins said: “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.”
The startup names Broadcom, Western Digital, Medallia, Autodesk and Nutanix as customers and claims that they already resolve 30-40 percent of their daily IT support issues autonomously with Moveworks’ platform; impressive reach and a strong customer base for a company barely 36 months old. (Moveworks claims to have added LinkedIn, Symantec and AppDynamics as customers in recent months.)
Bhavin Shah, CEO, Moveworks said: “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.”
Rajeev Dham, Managing Director, Sapphire Ventures. “They have taken a problem space that has existed for 30 years and solved it using advanced AI. The potential for Moveworks is huge, but the excitement we heard from our CIO network and Moveworks’ customers stems from what they are already delivering. I’m looking forward to being a part of the next phase of their growth.”
