A company with Arlington roots is using AI to improve tech support for companies around the world.
A “new take on the IT help desk,” Fixify seeks to minimize the need for humans in resolving a range of problems that companies face, CEO and Arlington resident Matt Peters told ARLnow.
“Most of the time, the real issue is not that the IT people at the company aren’t any good. The problem is that they’re buried,” Peters said. “What they really want to do is stop worrying about these, break, fix, interruption type tickets, and they want to get onto these projects, like, let’s get all our stuff moved to the cloud, or let’s get Salesforce stood up.”
Fixify’s process can handle roughly 75% of a company’s tech support questions, he said. That’s due to a combination of people and technology, which identifies solutions and effectively translates them to end users.
It starts with employees filing a ticket like they normally would, seeking help with software, hardware or network issues. Artificial intelligence then suggests the next steps by evaluating the problem and prioritizing the most urgent issues.
Then, staff members work directly with end users, ensuring that jargon is eliminated and the most concise solution is communicated to employees.
“You explain it like humans, which I think is kind of a big deal,” Peters said. “Because it’s still humans in the loop. It’s not one of these things where it’s just another bot. That’s one of the problems I think a lot of people have been dealing with — they deploy one of these bots and people don’t want to talk to another piece of technology.”
Fixify launched in September 2023 as the brainchild of Peters, Mase Issa and Peter Silberman, who all hail from Northern Virginia. The company is currently all remote, but its legal address is listed as Peters’ house.
The three founders had previously worked together at Fairfax-based security monitoring firm Expel, but opted to carve a new path due to their shared love of solving common problems, Peters said.
“You always hear about software as a service,” Peters said. “We joke and we say we’re actually in service as software, because by building a platform like a software platform, you can then make the kind of services that people deliver that much more scalable, right?”
Under Peters, Issa as chief operating officer and Silberman as chief technology officer, Fixify has grown to 40 employees in the 15 months since its launch.
The company announced in October that it had closed a $25 million funding round, which will allow Fixify to take the next step in growing the business.
“Now it’s time where we want to start scaling up that go-to-market engine, and so that’s what led to the capital infusion,” Peters said. “The use of funds will primarily be around scaling up the go-to-market to get this in the hands of as many customers as we can.”
