Matt Peters spent more than a decade working for cybersecurity vendors. He was team lead at Check Point, VP of worldwide operations at FireEye, and over four years at Expel-a managed detection and response firm-as chief product officer.

The biggest common denominator throughout all these was surprising," Peters says: IT teams were frustrated because expectations around technology rarely matched up with reality.

Organizations demand much from their IT departments. According to one poll, nearly a third of staff at the average company bank on a response from IT within an hour. Roughly the same percentage expect help with any new tool that their employer requires they learn.

Yet in these problems, Peters saw a business. Joining forces with former colleague Peter Silberman and Mase Issa, another ex-Expel employee, Peters co-founded Fixify, an IT help desk software with an automation twist.

It integrates well with existing IT ticketing software, such as Jira and ServiceNow, to help categorize tickets automatically and find "hotspots" with recurring problems. Applying AI, Fixify attempts to isolate the root causes of these problems and then sends the related matter over to the IT analysts it has hired for diagnosis and resolution.

Fixify is for tech-centric businesses between 100 and 2,000 employees that want to provide great IT help desk but can't invest in the staff and tech stack to make that good experience happen, said Peters. "We charge an annual subscription based on the number of employees a customer has. A company with 750 employees would pay us $9,000 per month, which is the cost of one full-time help desk analyst.".

According to Peters, Fixify is relying on a sentiment analysis tool to interpret the tone and urgency of incoming requests. What this does besides assisting in triage is also give analysts an idea of what to expect and how to respond.

"That way by tracking sentiments from the beginning all the way to close of a ticket, we can monitor the user experience and quickly identify when extra attention is needed," he said.

As analysts process tickets, Fixify customers — and their own IT personnel — can chip in if desired. As the ticket statuses are automated updates, stakeholders will always be on the same page.

For instance, through the admin panel of Fixify, customers can choose which categories of the tickets they need analysts to focus on. They can also get performance metrics, such as time taken to resolution, and recommendations for proactive intervention among other file requests to delete sensitive information from Fixify's platform. The latter is helpful in case sensitive information needs to be erased, and by default, Fixify retains data for 12 months depending on "customer needs and contractual obligations."

He added that the IT analysts get support from our AI to suggest the next step based on the specific process that every customer follows. They also help identify tools that could be needed for each task based on the context of the ticket and the playbooks. Our vision is to handle up to three quarters of the customer's ticket volume from beginning to end-not just reroute, he said.

IT teams are eager to embrace automation as the pressure on them just grows thinner and thinner. In a December 2023 Digitate survey, 90% of IT decision-makers said they plan to deploy more automation, particularly in functions such as finance and customer support, in the next 12 months.

The concept of outsourcing high-tech IT is not really new. Some startups are trying the idea, such as Primo-specific to hardware and Fleet, which has also shown an inclination towards hardware. Wizeline is another one.

But there's much dinero in the segment. According to a 2023 IT Outsourcing Statistics survey conducted by Avasant Research, organizations increased their annual IT outsourcing budgets by 8.1 percent last year. And according to a projection by Deloitte, the market for IT outsourcing will "jump 22 percent from 2019, exceeding $519 billion in 2023."

Investors appear smitten with the automation angle at Fixify — perhaps because automation has the potential to boost productivity while lowering overhead.

This month, Fixify closed a $25 million Series A round co-led by Costanoa Ventures, Decibel Partners, and Paladin Capital Group, which involved Scale Venture Partners. Through the deal, Mourad Yesayan, managing director at Paladin, is set to join the board of Fixify.

The general tech slowdown has actually created two or three opportunities for us, but this series A investment is funding us for the foreseeable future-and certainly through the expected uptick in the economy that many economists are predicting, said Peters.

Launched in 2023, the Arlington, Virginia-based Fixify has raised $32 million so far. The company is close-term focused on growing its 41-person workforce and customer base, which stands at 15 companies.