Console raises $23M Series A from DST Global and Thrive Capital to automate enterprise IT support with AI

For sure. For sure. Uh anyway, we have our next guest in the reream waiting room. We have Andre from console. Welcome to the room. How you doing? Hey guys, doing good. How are you? Thanks so much for joining. Uh kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, what you do, what the announcement is. Sure.

Thank thank you for having me. Uh big fans here. I actually got the whole team. I don't know if you can see them kind of watching. I'm watching. Hey, turn around guys. We can see you. There's a little bit of a time delay. Say hello. There's some delay maybe. Yeah.

So, um yeah, I mean today we're here to kind of, you know, talking about uh series A announcement. We just uh there a little delay. What you got? Um we just raised our series A uh DST Global and Thrive Capital. Uh oh. How much how much you raised? $23 million. There you go. There you go. Congratulations. All right.

All right. What do you do? What do you do? I got to know. You got to tell us. Yeah. I'm not going to tell you. Stop burying the lead. Stop burying the lead. Tell us what you do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, we automate IT support using AI agents that understand how your organization works. Fantastic. Um, I know.

Uh, so we're not just a chatbot, you know, under the hood. We're basically plugged into all your systems, your apps, your devices. We understand how everything's laid out. So, we know, you know, this is this is John.

This is his title, department manager, the direct reports, the apps he has access to, the permissions in those apps. So, like all this data is flowing into console from all these different systems. And then we let you uh build company policy and processes above that layer uh in natural language.

So, we call these things playbooks. Um but essentially you're able to say you know when someone needs a password reset first ask them this question then run this action and then do this thing. So that's not converted to code. It's just natural language instructions uploads the agent just handles that directly in Slack.

How modern is the wheelhouse customer for you? Because I when I started my first company in 2012 uh we were late enough in the roll out of SAS that we had no on premise servers whatsoever. We had no local network.

We just had, you know, Google cloud apps and Gmail accounts and so everything was was mana man managed in in various dashboards and it was an immense hassle to deprovision and provision. Um, but there is a whole other world of companies that have much more complex IT policies. Uh, where are you seeing the most value?

What does the wheelhouse customer look like? Yeah. So we we've started with the kind of more like modern tech companies to get started. So a lot of our customers you ramp actually one of our customers. Uh there you go. Uh um you know shout out to them. They're a great customer. Uh scale flock safety web flow.

These are all customers that are you know they're kind of like internally looking to you. They're starting to think about what does it look like? What does it look like? Yeah. In the age of AI, right?

And I think kind of what happened was we got it right in the 70s the '8s right where computers started being a thing and you know it was really this uh department that was coming in and showing people like look get off your typewriters here's how computers work here's how you can be more efficient and they were like kind of optimizing business process and somewhere along the way kind of like you mentioned right we started adding too many apps and too many there too many things that were being kind of managed right and uh you know it kind of lost focus from being this kind of driver of innovation in the organization to just like stuck in, you know, they're like on this ticket treadmill, right?

You come in, you've got 10 tickets, you log out, you've got 15. So, you you're kind of just like always just handling tickets.

And so our kind of mission here is you know how do we take it back to where it was where you know take it take off the support load from them handle all of those tickets for them using AI that again works the way they do and then get get them back to you know working with other teams and finding ways to like optimize their their process essentially.

How does security fit into all this? I feel like the the this the IT professional is very much the unsung hero, the enemy of the fisherman, the the fishing scams.

Uh I mean, every place I've worked that's like professional or had a professional email, you get these fishing scams and I feel like Sherlock Holmes when I clock it and send it to the IT guy, hey, we're getting a fishing scam. And he's like, I set that up. I sent that to you. I was testing you. It was a test.

Uh but yeah, talk to me about security and how that fits in. It feels like I really don't want my IT professional to be able to be prompt injected. There needs to be a human in the loop still maybe. But maybe you know something else. Yeah. So um yeah, I guess you you hit on a couple things.

So but first we uh obviously spent a lot of time internally on security making sure things work really well. This is my second company. First company we were doing application security uh company we're selling to US government Fortune 100. very familiar with, you know, building secure software.

And um uh so that's like the first thing I think, you know, next we think about well, how do we actually kind of like give the LLM and the AI agent control over the process and like the order that things get done and like kind of like, you know, this this ability to flex with the user and work with the user, but then build more deterministic processes for things like API calls and actually, you know, the things that are more sensitive, right?

And so our sensitive actions are actually quite locked down and you have the ability to, you know, get approvals on them, do MFA checks, um, you know, honestly just lock them down. Some companies say, "Hey, we don't want to reset any passwords with console, right? " Like we just don't have to, right?

Um, so you can kind of adopt it as you're comfortable. Um, and then lastly, yeah, if if if you don't support, you know, let's say password resets, your your company, you decide that's too risky, um, we will loop in a human when those requests come through.

So the way you know the way kind of console works high level is we sit in Slack um instead of having to go to you know like a Jira ticket form or something and you have to fill out you know the subject line and then you're answering you know the laptop you have and you're like shouldn't it already know what laptop I have um and you're kind of just going through this list and you hit it and you wait for wait for some response.

You go into console you type in your issue just like you're messaging a coworker that request goes in 50 to 60% of the time we handle it entirely with the end user and then when we can't we actually loop a human in.

So on the back end we'll you know basically message them and say hey like you know John is having this issue here's everything you need to know about John and they can jump in and then the end user stays in Slack right they don't have to go to a separate portal or anything like that makes sense what's the go to market did you share did you share any numbers related to the fund raise outside of the headline number anything uh on on the business side are we stay I don't know that we're sharing too much yet uh we're doing really well uh so we are hiring watching that sign that the company's ripping, you know, give it give it away.

The the number that I got uh like kind of off the record, but I'll share is uh is one and that's uh and then and that's uh contracts with ramp. So that's the really the headline KPI. Uh it's more of a binary metric for success, but uh it's the really the only metric of success that matters in Silicon Valley these days.

Uh so congrats on on passing that binary test. Uh talk to me about the go to market. uh based on the size of customer, I'm super interested to know is this like steak dinners, handtohand combat, phone calls, you know, uh just direct response, are you G2 hacking? What's going on? I mean, we are very flexible.

We'll do what it takes, right?

Um I think um the the standard process is actually you know we'll connect with some you know some folks um you know someone on the IT team uh usually some you know head of head of IT director of IT um and we'll give them a demo usually they have some AI initiative internally where they're you know looking at again how do we make it more efficient or or kind of like rethink how we do this.

Um we do a demo usually they're sold we do a P right after that. So to get into a PC, we do like an on-prem, sorry, we do like a full full product deploy into their systems. We'll do things like, you know, company uh security review, legal, um whatever. Then we'll go live.

Uh about 3 weeks is usually how long we do like a PC for. So usually within the first week, what we like to say is you're actually in a good enough spot to go live companywide. Sure. We spend the rest two weeks just kind of like dialing it in. Um, but we go live pretty ver pretty pretty quickly.

I think scale actually went live in about three weeks um during the P uh companywide uh because they were just seeing so much success with it. Are you positioning the product as like purely additive to the existing IT systems, plug in with everything?

Are you seeing folks rip out uh legacy systems that they maybe develop themselves or legacy competitors? What's the what is the trade-off that the buyer is making at the moment? Yeah, shouldn't be any trade-off. Uh we our goal when we started the company was like, look, you're already managing a bunch of systems.

If we come in and we say, well, if you want to use console, you want to use AI, you have to replace half your systems, like that's just going to be a non-starter for really busy teams. And so what we do instead is we actually build really deep integrations into, you know, as much of your tool stack as possible.

So we integrate very deeply into like Octa, Google, you know, Slack, you know, even your Jira, right? Like we don't have to replace your ITM. So, um, your ticketing tool, you can actually keep that. You've spent a lot of time configuring it and building it out.

You can actually build, you can basically put console in front of that and act as like your first line of defense. And the reason we're able to do that, you know, I know it's kind of like an odd situation, like what do you mean you're not replacing any core system? Is you we're actually like doing work.

Um, so we don't need to replace your your ticketing tool because we actually do 50 60% of your, you know, the requests that you're getting um again without human involvement. And so that's often you just try to generally charge for the value.

Obviously, if you're doing 50 to 60% of the work, that's saving that's at least like sounds like one to many people's time. But how do how do you charge for it? Yeah, so we we just charge per end user per month basically.

So the number of employees you've got in the company, we kind of have like a a base price that we use and we discount as as a company gets gets larger. But we try to keep pricing pretty static. I know there's this trend to you know look at usage based pricing and so on.

What we found is you know one that can be a little confusing. You know credits and things are hard to like estimate especially upfront. Um and so what we found is like IT teams actually really like the predictability of knowing okay for this year I'm going to pay this much money for this tool.

And you know we kind of think of it as if you feel like you're getting a you know you're getting more value out of it than you're paying then you know great that's uh good for you. So awesome. Well, thank you for driving efficiency in the enterprise. This is something we need.

We I don't want to share I don't want to dox anyone, but uh you know, we we we definitely have some interns running wild with access to systems that I would love to be able to just fire off an agent to go clean up because uh you can't trust Tyler with uh these the access to the root keys to this kingdom.

Anything could happen. I want to be able to snap my fingers and deprovision him, turn off his RAM card before he buys more. Awesome. We know where to find names. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon. Great to hang out. Congrats on the round. Bye. What else we got going on?

We got We got bezel. We got getbasel. com. Your bezel concier is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Also, we got a new news from Donald Boat. He's been traded. Big trade deal. Trade deal. He's going over to Substack.

Um he says he's unless he's granted a retainer uh and a favorable contract from Nikita and Elon Musk, he will be taking his talents to Substack. Uh he's been having some fun. Is he really 67 feet tall? That's re very tall if that's true. Yeah.

So I I I didn't meet him in person, but I knew I know someone who did meet him and he's apparently super tall and very very slim. He says uh the low John size Yeah. In order to get him on the team, you got to give him a low mileage used Corvette Z06, C5 or C6. He's funny. He's funny. Funny guy.

How How much is a low mileage uh Zo? Uh probably $30,000 I would estimate. I mean Z06 is like the performance package. Um I believe we have our next