Astound, a new software company aiming to use artificial intelligence to streamline internal help desk requests, launched late last month with $11.5 million in funding.
The company was founded by Naghi Prasad, who has a PhD in artificial intelligence, and Dan Turchin, who has two decades of business experience, to take some of the pain out of the typically inefficient process of employees submitting requests for service and support.
“I don’t know anyone who gets excited when they need to call the help desk,” said Turchin, whose title is chief product officer. “We’re bringing the power of AI to global service organizations and helping deliver a radically better user experience.”
The $11.5 million series A round was dually led by Vertex Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners. Three other firms — The Hive, Slack Fund, and Moment Ventures — also participated in the financing.
According to Astound, which was previously known as Neva, the company has already partnered with McDonald’s and Adidas.
The key to Astound’s model is automating routine requests, such as resetting employee passwords and setting up new programs for workers. The goal is to use machine learning to fully take care of such issues without human intervention, thereby allowing the IT team to focus on higher-level concerns and cutting the cost associated with each help request ticket item.
Its technology also promises to better direct requests that do need employee help to the right person, whereas current systems often send auto-generated tickets to a generic user and then must be forwarded throughout the IT department.
Astound believes that what it calls “fully-autonomous agents” can cut down on the volume of requests that must be addressed by human workers by some 70%. Further, it estimates that resolution times will be drastically reduced, and the per-ticket cost — which it currently estimates to be $25 — can be cut to less than $2. “Employee service has to change,” said Turchin.
(Photo credit: annca / Pixabay)
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