With its expressive slogan “instant help at work“, Moveworks is a cloud-based AI platform purpose-built for large enterprises that solves one, big, frustrating problem: Resolving employees’ IT support issues. Instead of tracking issues, Moveworks uses advanced AI to solve them, instantly and automatically—with no human intervention. Founded in 2016, the company has received $105 million in financing in two rounds of venture capital. Now, the time for new investments has come. Yesterday, Bhavin Shah, CEO and Founder of Moveworks announced that Moveworks has raised $200 million in Series C funding—at a valuation of $2.1 billion.
The round was jointly led by Tiger Global and Alkeon Capital. Bain Capital, ICONIQ Growth, Kleiner Perkins and a number of other institutional backers participated as well. Palo Alto Networks Chief Executive Nikesh Arora is joining Moveworks’ board as an independent director following the investment.
Moveworks provides an AI-powered chatbot that can automatically answer technical support requests from a company’s employees. The chatbot is capable of providing explainers on how to set up a printer or install a piece of software. It can also perform much more complex tasks, such as resetting a password or creating a Salesforce account for a newly hired member of the sales team.
Such tasks are normally performed by companies’ information technology departments, which often take hours or days to respond to a request. The reason for the delay is that administrators can have dozens of outstanding technical support tickets at any given time, meaning employees must wait until the earlier requests are resolved. By partly automating the process, Moveworks says that its platform can not only speed up troubleshooting but also free up administrators to focus on other tasks.
Under the hood, Moveworks’ chatbot processes support requests using an array of machine learning algorithms the startup collectively refers to as its Intelligence Engine. One of the machine learning algorithms is an implementation of BERT, a neural network originally developed by Google. Moveworks’ implementation of the neural network turns natural-language user requests such as “how to fix the printer” into a mathematical representation that its chatbot can understand.
“When we founded Moveworks, few people believed it was possible, and even fewer were committed to making AI support a reality. Our goal was to find these few companies, and leaders, who did believe. We discovered some organizations and people that could move quickly when they saw a good idea, that were motivated to help their employees focus on the work that matters, and that were willing to make a bet. These early customers were far from typical. They were and still are, pioneers in their own right. They had the foresight to see the impact on their business that our technology could make. And it didn’t matter to them that it wasn’t perfect. They wanted to help us make it perfect. It’s these customers that enabled us to refine our vision, ideate new capabilities, and grow this company. The investment and support of our early customers mean that today, you don’t have to be a pioneer to use Moveworks. They helped us build a solution every company in the world could use to get impact on day one. They enabled us to make AI accessible to everyone. It’s thanks to our customers that we get to make our vision a reality.”
Bhavin Shah, CEO and Founder, Moveworks
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