Epsagon founders raise $34 million for Harmony's AI workplace service desk

Epsagon founders Nitzan Shapira and Ran Ribenzaft raised a $34 million seed round for Harmony, an AI workplace service desk that eliminates tickets and portals by processing employee requests inside Slack and Microsoft Teams. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with Harmony claiming some deployments deflected 48% of support requests within two weeks and over 75% within three months.

Nitzan Shapira https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitzan-shapira?ref=runtimewire and Ran Ribenzaft https://cyberweektau.com/2024/speaker/ran-ribenzaft/?ref=runtimewire have raised a $34 million seed round for Harmony https://harmony.io/?ref=runtimewire , giving the repeat founders a substantial opening budget for their attempt to remove tickets, portals and queues from employee support. Business Insider reported https://www.businessinsider.com/harmony-pitch-deck-ai-startup-34-million-seed-founders-cisco-2026-7?ref=runtimewire the financing on Tuesday, July 28. Lightspeed Venture Partners https://lsvp.com/company/harmony/?ref=runtimewire led the round, with Hitachi Ventures, Fin Capital, Mercer Ventures and Operator Partners participating. Harmony also named angel investors from the Wiz founding team, including Assaf Rappaport, and Eon cofounder Ofir Ehrlich. Harmony announcement https://harmony.io/press/harmony-raises-34-million-to-reinvent-employee-experience?ref=runtimewire The founders have already produced a meaningful return for Lightspeed. Shapira and Ribenzaft previously built Epsagon, an observability platform that Cisco acquired in 2021. The widely reported purchase price was $500 million, though Cisco did not confirm that figure to TechCrunch at the time. TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/16/cisco-beefing-up-app-monitoring-portfolio-with-acquisition-of-epsagon-for-500m/?ref=runtimewire Shapira, Harmony's CEO, studied computer science at the Technion and worked on machine learning and geometry processing before leading Epsagon. Ribenzaft, Harmony's CTO, came out of Israeli military technology roles and became an AWS Serverless Hero https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-newest-aws-heroes-september-2019/?ref=runtimewire while building Epsagon's cloud infrastructure tools. Their second act keeps them in enterprise software while moving closer to the daily work that happens after infrastructure is deployed. Shapira on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitzan-shapira?ref=runtimewire From observing software to operating it Founded in 2025, Harmony puts AI agents inside Slack and Microsoft Teams to process requests that would usually become tickets for IT, HR, finance, procurement or legal teams. Examples include granting software access, resetting passwords and multifactor authentication, onboarding employees and coordinating offboarding. Lightspeed https://lsvp.com/company/harmony/?ref=runtimewire Harmony's agents use details such as an employee's identity, role, devices, applications and permissions to decide how a request should be handled. Administrators can require human approval before an action is executed, an important control when an agent can change access rights or touch systems of record. Business Insider reported that Harmony connects with more than 100 applications. Harmony separately says it has built more than 100 preconfigured agents. Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/harmony-pitch-deck-ai-startup-34-million-seed-founders-cisco-2026-7?ref=runtimewire That shift from answering to executing defines the founders' pitch. A chatbot can retrieve a policy or point an employee toward a form. Harmony is selling the completion of the underlying work, including identity checks, approvals, provisioning and audit records. The pitch depends on reducing the number of systems an employee has to touch for routine internal support. In Harmony's version, an employee should not have to find the right internal tool or support portal before the workflow starts. Customers named by Harmony and Business Insider include n8n, eToro, Cyera and Kith. Harmony says some deployments deflected 48% of support requests within two weeks and more than 75% within three months. Those figures are Harmony's measurements, and Harmony has not published the underlying customer data or methodology with the announcement. Harmony announcement https://harmony.io/press/harmony-raises-34-million-to-reinvent-employee-experience?ref=runtimewire A large seed for a longer second act Harmony has 60 employees, roughly two-thirds in Israel and the remainder in New York, according to Business Insider. The new capital will fund hiring across engineering /article/telli-berlin-hiring-engineering-design-gtm , product and sales. The pitch deck shared with Business Insider says customers typically begin with IT and expand into other employee support functions, turning the service desk into a route toward broader enterprise deployments. Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/harmony-pitch-deck-ai-startup-34-million-seed-founders-cisco-2026-7?ref=runtimewire Shapira told Business Insider that the size of the seed gives Harmony room to scale without returning to investors quickly. He also set a different objective for the founders' second venture: building a much larger independent business instead of accepting another early acquisition. Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/harmony-pitch-deck-ai-startup-34-million-seed-founders-cisco-2026-7?ref=runtimewire That decision explains the round's size. In an earlier LinkedIn update, Shapira described Harmony as having 50 employees and dozens of paying customers; Harmony says the new funding will expand its team. Shapira on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nitzan-shapira one-year-ago-ran-and-i-started-harmony-activity-7474815956008185856-QMas?ref=runtimewire , Harmony announcement https://harmony.io/press/harmony-raises-34-million-to-reinvent-employee-experience?ref=runtimewire Lightspeed is underwriting speed, the founders' prior execution and their access to enterprise buyers. The same investor backed Epsagon, giving it direct experience with Shapira and Ribenzaft through a full startup cycle. The capital also reflects the competition Harmony faces. ServiceNow https://newsroom.servicenow.com/press-releases/details/2026/ServiceNow-launches-Autonomous-Workforce-that-thinks-and-acts-adds-Moveworks-to-the-ServiceNow-AI-Platform/default.aspx?ref=runtimewire has folded Moveworks into its AI platform and, in May, expanded autonomous agents across IT, employee service, security and other functions. Freshworks https://www.freshworks.com/pressrelease/freshworks-unveils-ai-agent-studio-in-freshservice-to-unlock-service-transformation-that-drives-compounding-business-growth/?ref=runtimewire launched Freddy AI Agent Studio for Freshservice customers that same month, offering prebuilt IT and HR agents alongside a no-code builder. Harmony's opening comes from starting without an installed ticketing platform to defend. Shapira and Ribenzaft can design workflows around agents, approvals and chat from the beginning. Incumbents arrive with mature customer bases, years of enterprise data and established governance controls. Those assets matter when software receives permission to reset credentials, grant access and alter employee records. The founders turned software visibility into a reported $500 million exit with Epsagon. Harmony asks them to solve a harder organizational problem: persuading large employers to let AI perform internal work rather than merely recommend the next step. The $34 million seed buys time to prove that trust before incumbent service-management vendors squeeze its opening.