Startup Shelf.io today announced that it has raised $52.5 million in funding after quadrupling sales of its enterprise knowledge management platform over the preceding year. 

Shelf.io, officially Gemshelf Inc., says its platform can help companies’ employees find answers to work-related questions faster. The software uses an artificial intelligence engine the startup calls MerlinAI to scan the knowledge bases, customer databases and other systems where a company stores information related to its business. From there, MerlinAI automatically identifies the specific piece of information needed to answer an employee’s question.

Workers can interact with MerlinAI via a search bar. It surfaces the content that contains the most relevant answer to employees’ queries not only based on what keywords are included in each query but also other factors, such as previous employee searches.

Shelf.io provides another set of features for the teams in charge of managing the content that MerlinAI surfaces. Team members can use the startup’s platform to organize documents and collect feedback on the quality of help desk articles.

Shelf.io is placing a particular emphasis on the customer service segment as part of its go-to-market efforts. In addition to the search bar, the startup provides MerlinAI as part of a tool that analyzes support requests and automatically generates a response based on information from a company’s systems of record. Shelf.io also allows organizations to incorporate its technology into their online knowledge bases to help customers find articles that answer their support requests on a self-service basis.

The startup claims it can reduce the time it takes customer service representatives to answer requests from an average of four minutes to less than 20 seconds in some cases. The result, the startup says, is that tickets can be resolved 25% faster in certain situations.

Shelf.io’s $52.5 million funding round was jointly led by prominent venture capital firms Tiger Global and Insight Partners. They were joined by about a half-dozen other investors including Base10 Partners and Connecticut Innovations. Shelf.io disclosed today that it quadrupled revenue year-over-year in the 12 months leading up to the funding round while its user base grew tenfold, but the startup didn’t share absolute numbers.

Multiple startups with products that promises to make companies’ help desks more efficient have raised funding in recent quarters. One of them is Moveworks Inc., which closed a $200 million round at a $2.1 billion valuation in June. Moveworks provides a chatbot that enables companies to automatically answer many of their employees’ information technology support requests.

One of the reasons the segment has drawn such significant investor interest may be that it represents a particularly broad market: Practically every large company has a customer support department. As a result, startups offering AI tools to streamline customer support operations have a large pool of potential buyers. Additionally, the growing focus on automating manual business processes in the enterprise is likely helping to fuel demand for products that can reduce the amount of manual work required to answer support requests.

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