Moveworks, which uses AI to automate the processing of tech support problems and issues, is attracting more attention in the venture capital community.
Just seven months after a $30 million Series A round, the Mountain View, California-based startup just snagged another $75 million from new investors, led by Kleiner Perkins, ICONIQ (which, famously, serves as a money manager to Mark Zuckerberg) and Sapphire Ventures.
The round also includes a personal investment from John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft and a partner at Lightspeed Ventures.
Moveworks uses AI and natural language processing to handle company support tickets, emails or chat messages employees send to their company’s IT team when they need to unlock an account, to access a file, or to upgrade a program on their laptop that they forgot they needed to be done before a big trip.
Tasks that typically take three days to resolve can be fixed in minutes, even seconds, according to the startup. Moveworks’ technology is used by major corporations, including Broadcom, Autodesk and Western Digital, the company says.
Mamoon Hamid, Kleiner Perkins managing director, said the Silicon Valley VC firm has been increasingly interested in this space, but passed on the opportunity to invest in the company’s Series A round a few months ago.
“Typically we’re a Series A investor, but we really thought that we would still want to get involved with Moveworks at Series B even though we didn’t get involved in their Series A,” he told Business Insider.
Moveworks didn’t seem to have traction in the market a few years ago, Hamid said.
“They effectively had one or two beta customers using the product on a very small scale, like a small subset of an employee group inside a company using it,” he said. “It was just very early.”
But Moveworks quickly pulled away from other startups that offered similar tools.
“At the time there were four companies doing something similar,” he said. Moveworks “really just pulled ahead from the rest of the competition as well as demonstrated that they have a product that really addresses the needs of an enterprise.”
“They’ve really made tremendous progress on the customer side and getting wall-to-wall deployments of Moveworks. It’s just a lot of progress since their Series A.”
Moveworks co-founder and CEO Bhavin Shah said he and his team set out to ease the burden of IT support teams that routinely have to deal with what can sometimes be routine tasks.
“We felt that this was a huge opportunity to take something off the plate of the CIOs,” he told Business Insider in August. “They and their teams don’t want to do these mundane tasks. They want to work on other things like maybe a big upgrade or maybe a new data center or something that’s more exciting.”
Here’s the pitch deck Moveworks used to raise $75 million from new investors led by Kleiner, ICONIQ and Sapphire Ventures: