Aaref Hilaly’s Post

There's a saying in venture: it's great for a startup to be early, but not too early. No company has done a better job of striking that balance than Moveworks, which ServiceNow acquired today for approximately $3 billion. Thanks to Enrique Salem, Bain Capital Ventures partnered with the Moveworks founders, Bhavin Shah, Vaibhav N., Varun Singh and Jiang Chen, at Series A in 2017 (before I joined the firm). It was three years before OpenAI's GPT3 showed the potential of autoregressive models, and five years before ChatGPT. But the founding team saw genAI as the future and built ahead of its arrival. In many ways, you could call Moveworks the OG AI-app! As context, Moveworks built a "system of intelligence" for IT service management (think: IT support). Its insight was to automate the actual work being done, using AI, rather than just capturing the workflow in a system of record, like ServiceNow. That was much harder to pull off before LLMs. In those early days, Moveworks was ML-based and, through skillful design, was able to fully resolve 30-35% of tickets, which was a huge breakthrough at the time. So when LLMs came along, and it became possible to resolve 90%+ of tickets automatically, the company was perfectly placed to roll-out GenAI -- for IT support, enterprise search and more generally. Huge congrats to the entire Moveworks team! Our thanks and immense gratitude to the founders, early customer and team-member Yousuf Khan, and our friends and co-investors Arif Janmohamed at Lightspeed and Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. More on the acquisition from Fortune and about the path to this milestone below in comments. https://lnkd.in/ggBZ_mRh