Moveworks raises $200M to automate enterprise IT tasks

Moveworks, a platform designed to automate support at work, today announced that it closed a $200 million series C funding round led by Tiger Global and Alkeon Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital, Iconiq Growth, and Kleiner Perkins. The proceeds bring the company’s total raised to $315 million and value the company at $2.1 billion post-money, representing one of the largest investments in an AI platform for employee service to date.

With conventional approaches, support teams take an average of three days to address issues including IT tickets, HR requests, and policy questions by hand, causing disruptions that can delay work. Nearly one-third of departments regularly affected by technical problems say that an hour of downtime costs them $1 million or more.

Moveworks aims to ease the IT burden with a combination of natural language understanding, conversational AI, and semantic search. Using the platform, employees can describe what they need via a chatbot in an existing messaging tool, like Microsoft Teams and Slack.

“AI has become a necessity to support employees in the work-from-anywhere world,” Moveworks CEO Bhavin Shah said in a press release. “People expect to get the help they need right away — no matter where they are, no matter when they ask. But to create such a simple experience, we had to engineer advanced deep learning techniques that didn’t exist before, and then make that complexity completely invisible to our users. With this investment, Moveworks will bring AI support to every employee at every enterprise.”

AI-powered

Moveworks’ cloud platform integrates with service management systems, identity and access management systems, knowledge bases, email accounts, workflow automation, and facilities management dashboards, applying an engine trained on over 100 million real-world scenarios to identify troubleshooting steps for support issues. A semantic search component leverages context to sift through and extract answers from articles, documents, and FAQs. This complements Moveworks’ remediation solution that fields a range of requests automatically, and that lets employees self-serve email list requests while automatically routing support tickets to the right group.

In March, Moveworks announced the launch of the Employee Service Platform, which can handle human resources, finance, and facilities issues end-to-end, from the initial request to the final resolution. Beyond answering questions about unlocking accounts, resetting passwords, and provisioning software, the Employee Service Platform helps surface forms, pull answers from knowledge bases, and route requests to the right subject-matter experts.

“We engineered a unique approach to understanding the language used in the enterprise, which we deployed prior to this product expansion to resolve IT issues — without predefining specific intents or hard-coding rigid workflows. That approach is our multifaceted intent system,” CTO Vaibhav Nivargi told VentureBeat via email in a previous interview. “At a high level, it is a generalized natural language understanding system. Rather than predefining specific user intents, our multifaceted intent system determines the overarching action and resource type needed to resolve each issue. Once we’ve established this generalized intent, we then evaluate the utility of potential resources.”

While the platform competes indirectly with Electric in an IT solutions segment that’s expected to reach $35.98 billion by 2025, Mountain View, California-based Moveworks claims to have seen a 700% increase in active users over the past few months as remote work became commonplace during the pandemic. Current and former customers include Palo Alto Networks, Slack, Western Digital, Broadcom, Autodesk, Belkin, Stitch Fix, and LinkedIn.