Moveworks Raises $30 Million And Unveils AI Solution To Help Resolve IT Support Issues

By Dan Anderson • Apr 18, 2019

Over the last three years, Moveworks has been developing an advanced artificial intelligence solution to autonomously resolve employee IT issues in the enterprise while in stealth mode with dozens of Fortune 500 and enterprise customers. The AI platform that Moveworks built — which combines Natural Language Understanding (NLU), advanced conversational AI, and process automation to identify the optimal solution and fully resolve IT issues — has been deployed and endorsed by CIOs at the Fortune 500 and leading enterprise companies like Autodesk, Broadcom, and Nutanix.

Enterprises are able to completely eliminate the need for IT teams to work on pain point tasks like provisioning applications, resetting passwords/unlocking accounts, managing email lists, answering questions. This way IT teams can focus on high-value activities.

“Technology is the backbone of business productivity, yet, the average IT support ticket takes three entire days to resolve,” said Moveworks CEO and co-founder Bhavin Shah. “IT teams waste valuable time and money resolving the same issues over and over again. But it’s a hard business problem to solve and all of the approaches up to now have involved a lot of manual work supported by heavy processes and workflow tools. That’s why we built Moveworks: to provide the enterprise with an instant and autonomous solution that doesn’t just log the issue, but does the work.”

Moveworks’ platform was pre-trained to understand IT support issues. And once the system correctly deciphers the issue, it can automatically decide the best course of action to take. Plus it has been built with numerous integrations into common enterprise tools to retrieve the right piece of information.

“We got to a point where our employee base was growing at a pace that resulted in a 40 percent spike in IT requests. We tried portals, apps, workflows, and traditional automation, but it wasn’t working,” added Nutanix CIO Wendy M. Pfeiffer. “Then we found Moveworks and it’s been nothing short of magic. Most days, more than 30 percent of our IT issues are resolved autonomously, reducing the workload on our service desk and giving us more time and resources to focus on other critical business areas.”

The Moveworks platform was designed to learn continuously from every interaction with customers so it has a network effect where the more customers that are brought on and the more employees that are served, the smarter the system gets.  Shah explained that the company believes that software should be graded by how much real work it is doing rather than how many features it has.

Moveworks concluded that up to 75% of enterprise IT support issues can be understood and resolved using AI. Many of Moveworks’ customers are seeing 25 to 35 percent of their daily IT issues being resolved autonomously by the Moveworks AI platform. This proves that Moveworks is going to be a game-changer for the IT industry.

“As a global company with over 15,000 people worldwide, including many contractors, the ability to resolve IT issues quickly becomes critical to the business. Nothing came close to a truly autonomous solution until Moveworks,” explained Broadcom CIO Andy Nallappan. “We didn’t have to teach it anything, or write dialog flows, or create scripts — it was ready to go out-of-the-box and learned the nuances of our environment all by itself. Within the first few weeks, we were experiencing 20 percent resolution rates, and that’s climbing. We couldn’t do business without Moveworks today.”

The way that Moveworks measures success was based on resolution rather than traditional metrics like monthly active users. And the company tapped into cutting-edge technology in order to make the solutions easier to use.

“As a CIO, I have to focus on making IT operations more efficient. At the same time, I have to create an amazing employee experience that is intuitive and frictionless, which helps us attract and retain the best talent in the industry,” Autodesk CIO Prakash Kota pointed out. “Moveworks enables us to do both simultaneously and provides modern AI capabilities for our workforce. Moveworks makes it simple to integrate real AI seamlessly with our existing platform.”

The company could not depend on conversational AI because most chatbots use unreliable pre-scripted flows. And if it goes off-script, then the chatbots get confused. So Moveworks created a stateless conversation engine that performs natural language at every step of the conversation. And the system will know if users are trying to change the topic or if they misread instructions.

Moveworks also just announced it raised $30 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“The market is full of companies claiming AI capabilities, but most are just using generic machine learning models to make predictions or classify data,” Bain Capital Ventures and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem commented. “When I first met Bhavin and his co-founders, I immediately knew they were poised to do something big. The Moveworks team is at the forefront of so many different aspects of machine learning, and they have pulled it all together into this incredibly elegant solution that does real work, resolves real issues, and delivers demonstrable value to their customers. We’re thrilled to be partnering with such a world-class team and look forward to playing a part in the company’s growth and success.”

Jiang Chen (VP of Machine Learning), Vaibhav Nivargi (CTO), and Varun Singh (VP of Product) are also co-founders of Moveworks. The founders have decades of combined artificial intelligence  experience at companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Yahoo

“Moveworks is one of only a few true AI companies in the enterprise software market,” Arif Janmohamed of Lightspeed Venture Partners emphasized. “While other companies have been investing in incrementally better user interfaces, or basic applications of Machine Learning, Moveworks has been building an AI system that gets smarter over time and has achieved what no other company in the space has: true autonomy. We’re excited to have partnered with Moveworks from Day One and look forward to an exciting journey ahead.”