When employees at Autodesk Inc. and Nutanix Inc. submit a support ticket to the information technology department, their issue is oftentimes resolved before an administrator even gets around to reading the request.

The two tech firms are among the growing list of companies using help desk automation technology from Moveworks Inc., a three-year-old startup that today announced the completion of a $75 million funding round.

Iconiq Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Sapphire Ventures jointly led the investment. They were accompanied by several other participants, including Microsoft Corp. chairman John Thompson.

Moveworks provides a chatbot that can understand and act upon help desk requests. If an employee, say, inquires about getting a subscription to a productivity tool used by their team, the service will automatically create an account for them. For a worker that accidentally deleted a business document from a Dropbox folder and wants it restored, Moveworks can pull up file recovery instructions.

The machine learning models under the hood don’t understand every request. But Moveworks claims that its service is sophisticated enough to automate between 30% and 40% of support tickets sent to an IT department on a day-to-day basis. The result, according to the startup, is that administrators are freed up from repetitive requests while employees can have their questions answered faster.

Moveworks believes it will have the capacity to handle more complicated support tickets in the future. “Our system gets better with every passing day and with every new customer that comes on board,” said Moveworks Chief Executive Officer Bhavin Shah. “We’ve operationalized the modeling, training, annotation, re-training, re-factoring, algorithmic designs and continuous deployments to ensure our systems learn and get better in real time.”

Moveworks claims to have seen revenue triple in the past year thanks to deals with new customers such as Belkin International Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn. To keep up the momentum, the startup will invest the new funding in enhancing its service’s machine learning capabilities. 

Photo: Moveworks