Titan Scores $74M Funding To Build AI Platform And Acquire MSPs To Use It

‘We’re excited to be the first to go beyond just building software to build a full stack platform where AI and humans collaborate to deliver faster, better, smarter, more viable IT services. Getting this right means we’re not building a $100 billion company but instead are reshaping the industry for the better,’ says Saurin Patel, Titan CEO and co-founder.

Titan last week became the latest platform MSP, but one with a big AI twist.

Unlike the typical platform MSP, which is formed when private equity acquires an MSP with plans to use that acquisition to purchase more MSPs to build a national presence, New York-based Titan was founded to develop an AI and agentic AI technology to augment IT services and then make the acquisitions.

Titan last Monday came out of stealth with the news that it received $74 million in funding led by General Catalyst, a Cambridge, Mass.-based venture capital firm.

The company also unveiled its first acquisition, that of financial services industry-focused RFA.

Titan is a holding company transforming the IT services space with its augmented AI platform, said Saurin Patel, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

Patel (pictured above) told CRN that he previously worked at companies like Twitter and Snapchat, where he built machine learning and AI-related products including Snapchat’s My AI chatbot.

“We had a lot of passion for building these AI systems, and we’re pretty excited to be applying that now to the MSP space,” he said.

David Heffernan, Titan CTO and co-founder, told CRN he most recently spent several years at Scale AI working on the self-driving car team, and was a part of the team which led its AI data labeling initiatives.

Patel described Titan as an AI holding company.

“We find the best IT service firms out there to acquire and partner with,” he said. “Afterwards, we amplify IT professionals with our augmented AI platform to enhance service delivery to enable MSPs to scale efficiently and significantly elevate the standard of what OT service quality actually means.”

That, Patel said, leads to a win-win for MSPs and customers.

“Customers get faster, better, more proactive support,” he said. “The technicians are actually supercharged to scale and focus on the highest leverage work. And the MSPs who decide to partner with us on this journey are now able to scale with the efficiency of a tech company rather than a traditional services business.”

The plan is to combine multiple MSPs into a single large services organization powered by AI, Patel said.

“We will acquire these MSP businesses, and at the same time we have a team of AI engineers who come from some of the best tech companies and best schools out there,” he said. “They’re building customized AI solutions to supercharge the MSPs that join our platform.”

Heffernan said Titan is initially focusing its AI platform on improving and elevating the service quality that MSPs offer to customers.

“So less mistakes, faster response times, more personalized answers, and also driving more leverage and scalability in the way that technicians do their work,” he said. “For example, so there’s a lot [MSP tasks] around assigning licenses, resetting permissions, getting access to certain folders. It gets quite messy for an MSP with hundreds and hundreds of customers to be able to read special handling notes, send approval messages, escalate tickets, and so on.”

AI agents, on the other hand, reduce much of that mess, Heffernan said.

“Agents are really good at taking these tasks and putting a lot of intelligence on top of them to automate and augment the technician workflow to solve issues fairly quickly,” he said. “We’re also seeing a boost to more complex tickets. So when multiple tasks come in at the same time, AI agents are able to realize that there’s some underlying root cause that might be applied to multiple customers and extrapolate and help proactively fix a lot of solutions for other customers as well.”

While Titan expects to acquire multiple MSPs that will bring their own services and software stack, the company’s AI platform was designed to take into account those differences, Heffernan said.

“The beauty of these LLMs is that they’re fairly flexible and not dependent on the type of MSP,” he said. “Even though the systems are different across MSPs, the requests are fairly similar. Everyone’s using Azure and has issues with their email. Our core agent platform is very flexible and can extrapolate across multiple MSPs. There’ll be some standardization of the stacks, but our engineering team is very good, so we can continue to build more integrations as needed.”

Despite its co-founders’ experience coming more from the AI technology side than the MSP business, Titan has built a team with MSP experience to bring multiple companies together into one, Patel said.

“First and foremost, we worked with a bunch of MSPs to get deeper into the industry and understand how MSPs work. We worked with a large number of MSPs to get started and build a lot of initial tech solutions. David and my background is more from the tech space. But David also has a lot of experience in tech-enabled operations from his time at Scale AI.”

Titan is also augmenting that experience with advisors, Patel said.

“On the MSP side, we brought on two senior advisors,” he said. “Jason Magee, who used to be the CEO of ConnectWise and is now the CEO of Cynet, has spent a long time in the MSP space. Our other advisor, Bob Guilbert, who used to be the COO 9chief operating officer) at Eze Castle Integration, a large MSP in New York City. The two of them are great advisors and provide guidance about the MSP industry.”

Patel said that the company is focused on more than AI.

“What we’re trying to do is not just build AI technology,” he said. “We’re trying to build an IT service that is redefining what the definition of high service quality is. The only way to do that is to vertically integrate and own the entire customer experience, certainly by combining AI augmentation and humans all within the same company. The two feed off each other much faster and much better, so we can build better AI solutions. Service technicians that work with us can better serve their customers. It’s a pretty tightly knit integration of not just how to build good AI tech, but how to actually deliver a better service at the end of the day. And unless you vertically integrate, you can’t really do that.”

For lead investor General Catalyst Partners, Titan is only one way it is looking to bring AI to services businesses, Patel said.

“They have a larger play here, across multiple different service industries,” he said. “They have a similar type of play in service-based industries where AI is going to significantly transform what service means in all those different industries. They’re doing this in spaces like accounting and HOAs (home owners associations) and call centers. We’ve partnered with them on that journey to do it in IT services.”

When it comes to future acquisitions, Titan looks for MSPs that provide a strategic add to its platform,” Patel said.

Before acquiring RFA, Titan looked at several potential acquisition targets, Patel said.

“RFA is actually one of the first MSPs serving the financial services industries,” he said. “They have a track record of over 35 years of providing best-in-class IT services to private equity firms, hedge funds, and wealth management firms. Some of their customers are the biggest asset managers in the world. The second reason that we’re pretty excited about partnering with RFA was they operate on a significant scale with over 400 customers in multiple countries, and are servicing around 100,000 IT tickets every single year. Third, RFA has a deep culture of technical excellence and innovation, and in a lot of our conversations with the owner and management team of RFA, we could see they were really excited about the AI vision and adopting this technology going forward.”

RFA was a profitable organization, he said.

A lot of folks in the MSP space and IT services know AI is going to redefine how work is done, Patel said.

“It will improve the lives of both technicians and customers,” he said. “We’re excited to be the first to go beyond just building software to build a full stack platform where AI and humans collaborate to deliver faster, better, smarter, more viable IT services. Getting this right means we’re not building a $100 billion company but instead are reshaping the industry for the better.”