Agentic AI: Analysis of ServiceNow’s $2.85B Moveworks Acquisition

The high growth Agentic AI market has attracted several big and niche players in the market. The industry is bound to see some consolidation. One such player is Mountain View-based Moveworks, which was recently acquired by ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) for an estimated $2.85 billion.

Moveworks’ Offerings

Moveworks was founded in 2016 by Bhavin Shah, Vaibhav Nivargi, Varun Singh, and Jiang Chen. The founders realized that there was a need to create a solution that could help reduce the time that organizations lose on resolving routine support requests. They wanted to create an AI Assistant that would have a better understanding of natural, conversational language and be able to execute on this communication. Initially, they focused on addressing the interaction and ticket requests for IT departments. They worked with a group of select customers to automate IT support use cases and operated in a stealth mode till 2019. They soon realized that the solution that was working for IT departments could also be leveraged to streamline support workflows and other business processes for other enterprise-wide departments.

Moveworks operates with the mission to give companies an agentic AI Assistant that integrates all business systems into a single conversational interface. Instead of relying solely on LLMs, Moveworks built a purposeful and conversational AI assistant that is powered by agentic reasoning and can plan and execute actions based on user goals. It is guided by permission-aware connectors that can not only find information but also automate tasks. Its developer platform has been built to create new agents. It comes with an analytic engine that governs and manages the AI Assistant, and it is protected by enterprise grade security. Today, its agentic AI works across domains to resolve employee issues at scale for over 350 enterprises and over 5 million employees worldwide. Its customer list includes names like Broadcom, Github, Honeywell, Jamf, Palo Alto Networks, Pinterest, and Toyota to name a few.

Moveworks’ Financials

Till recently, Moveworks was privately held and had raised $315 million in venture funding from investors including Alkeon Capital Management, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Ventures, TigerGlobal, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures. Its last round was held in 2021 when it had raised $200 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion. Moveworks does not disclose its detailed financials, but last year it had announced that it crossed $100 million in annual revenue run rate.

Earlier this month, ServiceNow announced plans to acquire Moveworks for an estimated $2.85 billion. Like other tech giants, ServiceNow too has been investing in building its AI capabilities. It plans to integrate its own agentic AI and automation capabilities with Moveworks’ AI assistant to offer a product that would be more powerful and help improve organization-wide productivity. ServiceNow’s existing AI solutions are seeing strong adoption. As of December 2024, they had more than 1,000 customers enrolled with the product and over $200 million in Annual contract value. The merger will help significantly boost ServiceNow’s AI offerings.

Photo Credit: Catalina Zapata from Pixabay

This segment is a part in the series : Agentic AI