Atera believes the future of IT is not just automated—but autonomous. Founded in 2010 and launching its all-in-one RMM/PSA in 2018, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company has leaned into AI as its growth strategy. Its AI-powered IT management platform features deep integration with Microsoft Azure-OpenAI, and in May Atera announced its agentic AI solution, IT Autopilot.
The company has been on the move. It has claimed the No. 5 spot in RMM/PSA market share, according to industry analysts Canalys. It opened a U.S. office in New York City last year. (See our conversation with the U.S. GM, Yoav Susz: Atera Bets On AI, Pricing Model, To Advance Foothold In RMM/PSA Market.) Atera has also been beefing up its executive team. And to data, the company has raised $102 million from investors including General Atlantic and K1 Investment Management.
In this conversation with MSP Success, Atera founder and CEO Gil Pekelman shares why the company is taking a best-of-breed partnership approach to its platform, why he believes the robot revolution will elevate all aspects of an MSP’s business, and what his long-term vision entails. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
MSP Success: For our readers who may not be familiar with Atera, tell me a little bit about the company.
Gil Pekelman: We launched [the product] in 2018. We were talking back then to end users, to companies, and every time we talked to them we heard, “You need to talk to my MSP.” And that’s how we found out many years ago about MSPs. We met the MSPs and found out that there [were] no good products for them for a certain size [MSP]. At the time Kaseya was already around and ConnectWise with their PSA, but slightly smaller MSPs really had nothing and that’s how Atera was born in 2018.
And we still to this day have something very unique. We were able to develop a product which was both an RMM, a PSA, and that the user interface and user experience was so intuitive they could just test it on their own, decide they liked it, put their credit card in, and start using it without talking to us—without salespeople in the middle.
At a certain point, we started working with larger MSPs and then a few years ago we started working with corporate customers and we have today 13,000 customers around the world in 120 countries. So we have a very, very wide gamut of segments, but we have one customer: the IT person. Sometimes he’s in a company, sometimes he’s an MSP, sometimes he’s an MSP and moves to a company, but it’s the same. Many times, by the way, when they move, they bring us.
MSP Success: You’re most often compared to NinjaOne. Do you consider them your prime competitor? And how do you differentiate from the field?
Pekelman: We need to talk a little bit about Atera today. Every two to three years Atera reinvents itself. In June of ’22 Microsoft and OpenAI came to us and said, “Look, we have this thing called a GPT. Maybe you can do something with it. Maybe it’s interesting for you to use it for something.” This is about six months before ChatGPT was released to the public.
We have been working on AI since 2017; our first original patents are from 2017. We’ve been working for 3 1/2 years; and in the field and we’ve launched [AI] on two things. One is an AI agent [IT Autopilot] that does the job of the IT professional. It doesn’t just talk to you, but it actually solves problems and it’s improving all the time. It’s able to handle 40% of all the tickets that go to an IT department independently, autonomously, without involving the IT professionals. This 40% is 100% of what they hate to do.
I’ve never seen anybody say to us, “I’d love to fix a printer.” Our agentic architecture and system are able to fix a printer, fix your computer, fix your screen, install software, patch it. Forty percent of everything that goes to an IT department, it can do independently, autonomously, without any human interaction.
MSP Success: Can MSPs use this product too?
Pekelman: Absolutely. IT Autopilot works 24/7. Think about the level of service once you implement IT Autopilot as an MSP; you free up 40% of the time of your team. I’m yet to see an MSP that isn’t stressed out, has a lack of personnel, is always looking to hire more. And suddenly 40% of all the stuff that he’s dealing with that he doesn’t really like goes away. He can start focusing on things that are more complex, more interesting, higher value, and his customers are getting service like they never got before.
For the customer, the user experience, you just open a regular ticket. The MSP needs to teach them either to send it by Slack or email or WhatsApp or something. It won’t help with the [phone] call, but if they do anything else it will start talking to them immediately. And it’s always nice and it has a sense of humor, and it never gets tired and it’s there 24/7. It’s a huge breakthrough. We’ve been working very hard on this.
And now when you think about Atera and you compare it to anybody else, the first thing that Atera does for a customer is eliminate 40% of the workload.
The other 60%, [we have] Copilot, which is like giving the IT guy a helper, a very sophisticated one. It’s the same architecture for Autopilot and Copilot.
So that’s Atera today. It’s a very different company. We don’t compare ourselves to RMM and PSA. We do have the RMM/PSA system as the core, and nobody buys IT Autopilot or Copilot and doesn’t buy the RMM and PSA.
Everything we have sits on Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI. Which means for us is security certifications, privacy, guardrails for the AI. You can’t ask our AI to buy theater tickets for you because it will answer, “I only handle IT problems.” It’s sitting on top of Microsoft’s information structure, which is a very strong thing.
MSP Success: Are IT Autopilot and Copilot all part of your platform or can you purchase them separately from the RMM/PSA?
Pekelman: IT Autopilot is separate; it can connect to ServiceNow or Freshdesk or Zendesk—whatever you’re using. A caveat: assuming that they have a good API that we can connect with. Copilot is an integral part of the ticketing and RMM system of Atera, so you would use it only if you use the Atera platform for managing your whole IT environment.
What happens in the MSP world is usually when somebody says I’m going to use IT Autopilot, they want Copilot, they want the whole suite.
MSP Success: You say that you really don’t compare to the NinjaOne’s and ConnectWise’s and Kaseya’s, and yet they’re all adding copilots and AI agents. So with everybody moving toward the same thing, how will you differentiate?
Pekelman: You can only differentiate in the present. I can’t differentiate the future because I don’t know what they’ll have, and I know how hard it is. What we did, it’s very hard. It’s also been in the field for almost two years. So it’s not only that we did it in the lab, but about two years ago we started implementing it in different sites and had design partners and different environments, etc.
IT Autopilot, I’d call it the tip of the spear, and they don’t have that. I’m looking for good analogies for it … it’s like Atera’s original SaaS software is like a toolkit. It has a lot of great tools and screwdrivers and all these beautiful things, and the box is beautiful. That’s what they [competitors] have and that’s what we had in the past. IT Autopilot is a robot, [like] a Tesla robot. I agree that [competitors] have some Copilot capabilities. But IT Autopilot is the robot revolution as opposed to better tools.
MSP Success: Can you talk about your roadmap? You’ve clearly leaned into AI, so where do you see this going for MSPs in the future?
Pekelman: We’re seeing two phenomena. One, the business is being upgraded; the profitability becomes upgraded. [AI] costs much less than a human employee. The service level becomes much better. If you’re fast into it, you also get an advantage compared to the MSPs around you that are still doing everything manually. That’s on the business side.
On the technician side, they’re all elevated because they don’t handle password issues anymore, [or] my computer is slow, can’t connect, can’t print— there’s 1,000 issues like that. They become Tier 2 kind of engineers. This is what they really want to do. A lot of them are stuck in Tier 1 and don’t have the opportunity or the time to move to Tier 2 and suddenly [time] is freed up. We’ve seen this everywhere in MSPs and corporates that when these guys are freed up they become Tier 2.
So everybody’s elevated here—the business itself with MSPs, the competitive posture, and the employees.
Another thing, a lot of these guys churn from the work because it’s soul crunching and [the] MSPs need to hire a new one and you train him until he leaves, etc.
MSP Success: Let’s look at the industry. As you know, the analysts have been talking about the move toward platforms. Some of the competitors in the RMM/PSA space have filled out their suites with backup and cybersecurity solutions. Is that a direction you’ll be going in as well?
Pekelman: What we’re doing strategically today is 100%, technologically speaking, focusing on AI. On the platform side we’re partnering with best-of-breed companies. So we don’t look at this point to acquire backup companies, etc., but rather choose the best backup companies out there, partner with them, and add them into our system and then you get a platform from Atera. [On the cybersecurity side] we’re partnered with Bitdefender and Malwarebytes and Webroot—anyone that an MSP tells us [they] we want to work with. We will go to them and say, “Let’s collaborate, let’s integrate, let’s make sure that our customers have a platform.” They get an ecosystem. We’re looking at platforms more like Apple and the App Store and having us focus on what we’re really great at. That’s the plan for now.
MSP Success: Let’s talk about the business side of Atera. You have filled out your executive team over the past few months—new CFO, CRO, CMO, and CISO. What are your growth goals, and will there be more funding rounds or an IPO?
Pekelman: We have something that has huge value. If you have an employee that has a problem and on the spot it’s solved by IT Autopilot, you just saved them maybe an hour. Now if you have 1,000 employees or you’re an MSP that has 1,000 users, 1,000 hours [saved] all the time is huge value. So our business is growing extremely fast. We are very well funded. We have two amazing investors. And we get daily calls from investors. We’re thinking about what’s the best business course for the company. But at this point we are not lacking in growth and speed and uniqueness. So it is a question whether or not another round is something we want to do or not.
MSP Success: How about an IPO?
Pekelman: Three weeks ago I was invited by NASDAQ for a full day of a boot camp and definitely an IPO is something we’re thinking of. For us, going to NASDAQ and going for an IPO is the Olympics and we’re trying to get to the Olympics.
