This Startup Is Using AI To Make IT Tickets Less Painful
Year-old startup Console works with Ramp, Flock Safety and Scale AI. Now it's raised a $23 million Series A to go beyond IT, too.
The Upshot
If you’ve ever filled out a support ticket, founder Andrei Serban is here to assure you that they’re no fun for the IT staff responding to it, either.
On one end, you’re locked out of your work email account or unable to install a software update. You’ve filled out a form before waiting a few hours, maybe even a day. On the other end, your IT colleague has been responding to tickets like this since logging onto work. They didn’t study systems administration just to reset passwords endlessly.
“No one actually enjoys the way IT support is done today,” Serban tells Upstarts.
His startup, Console, believes it can help. Its software combines a familiar user interface – Slack messages – with AI agents to automatically resolve lower-level issues, freeing up IT teams to work on proactive improvements and projects.
That’s what IT was initially about, Serban says. And with AI, it can be again, he claims. “We think that IT teams should be driving innovation in the organization, helping them to be more efficient. Somewhere along the line, we lost track of that.”
Co-founded last year in San Francisco by Serban and CTO Neal Chandra, Console already works with blue-chip customers including Ramp, Flock Safety, Scale AI, Webflow and Zip, with its agents automatically handling more than 50% of IT tickets. (Console declined to share an update on its revenue.)
In June, Console announced a $6 million seed round led by Thrive Capital with SV Angel. Just three months later, it’s raised again: this time, a $23 million Series A led by DST Global Partners and Thrive Capital.
Other participants include SV Angel, Abstract Ventures, Ramp founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.
Console was just six people when it raised its seed; it’s now 15, Serban says. The startup wants to double that by the end of the year. It’s feeling the urgency, he says, because users are pulling Console into new areas: human resources, then finance and legal support.
“Long term, we view it as being the platform for what we’re calling the autonomous organization,” says Serban. “Where you aren’t doing all of these mundane, repetitive tasks. You’re just able to tell a system, hey, here’s how our company works. Here’s all the data you need to know. Go do that for me.”
It’s an approach that Upstarts finds interesting, not just because while still at Forbes, we remember filing countless tickets (via Freshservice by the end) to reinstall Signal and WhatsApp for chatting with industry sources.
Console’s technology today combines a blend of agents and human backstops that it claims are more effective than chatbots that have been AI washed. Its wider opportunity makes intuitive sense. And it’s about to be in a fierce land grab – if it isn’t already – like we’ve seen play out with Decagon and Sierra in customer service, in a flurry of outsized funding rounds for ERP challengers to NetSuite like startup Doss, in the race among legal tools, and more.
“The market wants to coalesce around a couple of things that people know and can evaluate,” says Thrive partner Vince Hankes. It’s a dynamic that is driving interest to Console in the short-term, but puts it under pressure, too.
More on how customers are using Console – and why it feels a microcosm of the current races in vertical AI software – below.
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Console Gamer
Serban had just started at Rippling when the ChatGPT craze kicked off in earnest in early 2023. A Thiel Fellow who dropped out of the University of Waterloo, he’d taken his security testing app, Fuzzbuzz, through Y Combinator in 2019, then sold it to the HR, IT and finance software maker.
But while acquisitions in startupland usually have an earn-out period of two or more years (just look at the VCs flocking to the replies of former MosaicML co-founder Naveen Rao, who announced yesterday he was leaving acquirer Databricks after two-plus years), Serban “didn’t want to miss the wave” – he left after just five months.
From his admittedly brief stint leading IT product at Rippling, Serban knew that IT support was still mostly manual. Chatbots could try to deflect some user inquiries, but they typically still generated a ticket that a person then had to resolve. The chatbot might talk a big game; under the hood, it was just following a script.
Console got started in May 2024 with a different strategy: customers would put together ‘playbooks’ on how to handle situations; then, after connecting its software to their different business apps, it would process requests directly, only elevating them to a human for exceptions or edge cases.
At Bloomerang, which makes software for thousands of non-profits to manage fundraising, vice president of IT Seth Steward was using Freshservice when, skeptical of Console’s promise to deflect a larger number of tickets, he tried a pilot later that year.
“Everybody feeds off it a bit, and makes sure they’re bringing their best foot forward.”
With 600 employees and contractors overall, Bloomerang’s team of 10 IT professionals would typically handle about 300 tickets per month. A funny thing happened when they started working with Console: the tool really did manage about half of those tickets. But as they wised up to a higher level of service, employees started to make more asks, too. Requests doubled, meaning each IT worker still manages about the same number of tickets today.
The requests they get are more interesting and valuable to the business, however, Steward says. “It was like everybody on my team got a little bit of a promotion,” he says. In one example, a staff member shipped a zero-touch ability to deploy and onboard new employees on Macbook computers months earlier than expected.
Then a leader in Bloomerang’s human resources team asked if Console could answer questions directed to their department; then a finance team leader, eager to unload questions about the company’s business travel policies. HR doesn’t get as many questions as IT, Steward notes. But when it does, Console deflects more than 70% of the requests.
‘Owning the oxygen’
The last generation of IT software players aren’t oblivious. They’re rushing to add generative AI tools to their own chatbots and processes, from Atlassian to Freshworks and ServiceNow.
A big part of how Console hopes to stay ahead is by expanding like it has in Bloomerang across an organization, becoming the central dashboard (or ‘console’) for any internal questions an employee might have.
That means a lot of extra work right now. Internally, the startup calls forward-deployed engineering ‘customer-driven engineering’; in practice, that looks like engineers working closely with a customer to map out the new playbook, adding features as needed.
“We’re almost doing an AI consulting role for a lot of these teams,” Serban says.
But Console isn’t setting up bespoke, one-off implementations, its CEO adds; each solution, such as implementing support for using Okta, can be applied across its customer base.
“None of our customers have done any RIFs or layoffs on the IT team as a result of adopting Console.”
Looking ahead, Console has room to go deeper on IT use cases, such as a troubleshooting agent that could replace a human in taking over an employee’s screen to solve a trickier problem; it could also assist with preparing compliance documents or audits.
Like other work software AI startups, Console’s stance on its job impact is that it empowers staff to do more with less, but doesn’t replace people. “None of our customers have done any RIFs [reductions in force] or layoffs on the IT team as a result of adopting Console,” notes Serban.
Still, there is an effective impact when a company like Bloomerang can grow headcount everywhere else, while its IT team remains flat. Steward also notes that as his more junior staff become more like managers and systems administrators, it puts more pressure on the senior ones to work hard.
“Everybody feeds off it a bit, and makes sure they’re bringing their best foot forward,” he says.
So Console may provide a counterweight to more IT jobs popping up. The counter-argument is that the jobs that do exist become more interesting and fulfilling.
As with other Upstarts in the new AI stack we’ve covered recently, like Unify in go-to-market pipeline, Roadway in growth marketing, and even Delfa in filling clinical trials, one thing seems a safe bit: whether Console is the winner here or not, its category isn’t going back.
“The market wants to coalesce around a couple of things that people know and have evaluated,” says Hankes, its backer at Thrive. So the pressure is on Console and Serban to keep iterating rapidly, and use its new funding to get in front of as many people like Steward – in as many corporate team types – as possible.
It’s a land grab, adds Hankes. “It’s not really a question of, ‘do people want to buy it?’” he says. “When they see it, they want to use it. So for us right now, it’s just getting into the hands of as many companies as possible.”
“AI Chat bot is just following the script” - exactly 😅 that was my ongoing “beef” with all the AI chat bots. BUT! Console’s success is fully validated by what they shared - IT team started to see more tickets and more sophisticated asks. To me it tells me that Console positively impacted the team’s quality of work, which in turn increased the trust from other teams which brought this IT team closer to the rest of the org. I cannot think of a better validation of the true impact a tool could make.