‘We are becoming the platform of record as we enter into an era of autonomous endpoint management,’ says ControlUp CEO Jed Ayres. ‘AI is making it a lot easier for us to proactively remediate without IT having to take any action at all.’
ControlUp, an AI-driven autonomous endpoint management powerhouse, has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and achieved unicorn status, exceeding the $1 billion valuation mark.
“It feels amazing,” exclaimed ControlUp CEO Jed Ayres, who has led the agentic AI endpoint charge driving ControlUp’s rising recurring revenue and unicorn status. “Very few companies achieve this status. We’re in a very healthy position as we round the corner from DEX (Digital Employee Experience) into autonomous endpoint management. The size of the deals have doubled and over 50 percent of total ARR is represented by enterprise accounts exceeding 7,000 seats. What’s more, we now have five customers that are over $1 million in recurring revenue. We had none when I got here three years ago. That’s very exciting. It speaks to the fact that we are successfully selling to the enterprise with a much more comprehensive solution.”
The growth is being fueled by ControlUp’s automated remediation capability which is up 10X since Ayres became CEO. ControlUp, in fact, now runs about 10 million automated actions every several days.
“Those automated actions are all scanning for anomalies and essentially crushing them before they become a trouble ticket or some drain on productivity,” said Ayres (pictured above). “We are becoming the platform of record as we enter into an era of autonomous endpoint management. AI is making it a lot easier for us to proactively remediate without IT having to take any action at all. The AI models can see the anomalies faster and more efficiently than humans. This is where it gets very exciting!”
That step into a new era of autonomous endpoint is a far cry from ControlUp’s origins as a VDI observability and performance solution for Citrix and VMware environments. Today, the company is a leader in agentic AI, breaking new ground at a rapid pace in AI endpoint automation.
“We’re well beyond VDI now with a full autonomous endpoint AI platform that encompasses virtual desktops, physical desktops, browsers, applications, networks, Teams and Zoom observability and even security,” said Ayres.
ControlUp One Is Growing At A 37 Percent Clip
The company’s ControlUp One platform, which provides automated remediation across a full tech stack, is growing at a 37 percent clip, accounting for 20 percent of total sales, said Ayres. More than 106 customers have adopted ControlUp One since it was launched in January 2025. ControlUp One now accounts for one million of the six million endpoints managed by ControlUp.
The automated remediation that ControlUp provides encompasses a wide range of problems from application freezes to poor VDI performance to cache, memory or operating system issues impacting system performance.
Ayres said the automated remediation is changing the help desk landscape, requiring far fewer IT support staff to chase once hard-to-fix desktop and network issues. “We typically see between 20 and 30 percent of trouble tickets go away when you get the right automations put in place,” he said.
Ayres said the industry is at a “breakthrough moment” for AI-based automated remediation. “We’re seeing customers speed up adoption of our platform because of the AI automation we’re providing,” he said. “One customer was planning to roll out ControlUp to 130,000 endpoints over six months but after seeing the radical impact of AI on the first 300 endpoints they decided to roll it out to all 130,000 endpoints in one week.”
That kind of response is not unusual, said Ayres, given how badly the end user experience has eroded in some large healthcare, retail and financial services companies.
ControlUp is moving quickly with new capabilities to improve that end user experience including the release of a breakthrough offering to simplify Azure Virtual Desktop delivery, ControlUp DaaS (Desktop as a Service) IQ.
The recurring revenue milestone achieved by ControlUp comes amidst a channel renaissance at the company. Under Ayres, a staunch channel advocate, the percentage of channel revenue at ControlUp has shot up from 50 percent to 70 percent.
“Our goal is to try to get to as close to 100 percent as we possibly can,” said Ayres. “Partners play a huge role in this next chapter as we go into this automated remediation AI era. There are huge opportunities for managed services. We have spent a lot of time building multi-tenancy into the product and building programs for MSPs from the small regional providers to the national provider to the global system integrators. Partners are huge for us.”
One of the biggest opportunities for partners is helping customers reduce the number of tools and software agents running on Windows devices, said Ayres. “You have more agents on a Windows device today than you did 20 or 30 years ago, the ratio of people managing Windows hasn’t gone down that much,” said Ayres. “ControlUp is giving the partners the ability to consolidate that chaos and help customers run these environments more efficiently. For partners, the future is not about selling more tools. It is about eliminating them and participating in the drawdown of the number of humans doing mundane IT tasks. It is very low-hanging fruit for AI. You can immediately cut out 20-30 percent of the trouble tickets. That’s because those 20-30 percent of the trouble tickets are the same issue the help desk is solving over and over again.”
MSPs Becoming Agent Service Providers
Ayres said he sees MSPs becoming agent service providers with ControlUp providing the ability for partners to become operators at scale of these digital workspaces for customers. “It is going to be very lucrative because of the agentic nature of this,” he said. “Partners are going to essentially outsource hundreds of people with these products. We are entering a new era where MSPs that get in on the front end of this become agentic service providers. This is nirvana for solution providers because they can start to take huge swaths of the IT departments and run them for their customers.”
Gartner, the Stamford, Conn.-based market research firm, estimates that by 2029 agentic AI will automate as many as 80 percent of customer service issues without human intervention.
ControlUp is already seeing the impact of autonomous endpoint management to reduce the number of tools, IT staff and help desk tickets, said Ayres. “On average we are taking two to three tools out already in the course of every win we have,” he said. “There are a lot of legacy endpoint management solutions that don’t have the real time telemetry and remediation that we provide.”
TP, the global business process outsourcing behemoth formerly known as Teleperformance, is rolling out ControlUp at a brisk pace to capture the automated remediation benefits, moving over the last six months from 70,000 endpoints managed by ControlUp to 115,000 with a plan to hit 300,000 endpoints by the end of the year, said Garion Brown, global vice president of platform engineering for the $11.76 billion company.
“If we don’t achieve effectively anywhere from 1.5 to 2 times from an ROI (return on investment) perspective I’d be shocked,” said Brown. “We have done a lot of custom automations inside ControlUp already.”
TP is taking the top 10 to 20 help desk drivers and translating them from human hours into fully automated tasks, said Brown. “We are building a serious story around the platform that demonstrates not only how it paid for itself but also how it has gone above and beyond the commitment from a cost perspective,” he said.
Among the areas that ControlUp automated remediation is having an impact are application reinstalls, cache deletion issues, and VPN configuration issues, said Brown.
As to the return on investment, one COO told TP the product saved $1.7 million in cost avoidance for fines and outage time for the company, said Brown. “We were able to use the native capabilities of ControlUp to get to a root cause in a matter of hours rather than days,” he said.
“ControlUp gives you not only application visibility in terms of latencies and problems but it also gives you the full network stack visibility and that is where we are seeing the biggest bang for our buck in terms of finding that root cause,” Brown said. “It might show a hop from one target to another might be 200 milliseconds but to the next hop it might be 500 milliseconds where we would normally expect 100 milliseconds.”
Brown credits Ayres for driving AI agent innovation that is changing the game in automated remediation.
“Jed is a great leader who has improved the capabilities of the platform in meaningful ways,” he said. “He is genuine, transparent and more importantly he listens to his customers. As a result he has retained and hired some of the best in the business and made acquisitions that have improved the capabilities of the platform. I don’t see that stopping. Right now, ControlUp is the leader.”
Brown said he is optimistic about the agentic capabilities that are being brought to the help desk by ControlUp. “If we are able to automate even half of the top (help desk) call drivers the ROI will speak for itself,” he said. “It’s going to come down to ControlUp’s execution. Time will tell but the partnership is stronger than it ever has been.”
Mike Strohl, CEO of e360, Irvine, Calif. a top AI solution provider, said ControlUp is rewriting the endpoint management rules with automated remediation. “ControlUp has a really compelling solution,” he said. “What they are doing is resolving help desk problems automatically without the end user losing any work time or productivity. The reality is ControlUp is addressing an industry situation with a fresh approach. I see them continuing to win. We are seeing it with our clients.”
Overall, Strohl said his company’s ControlUp business is growing at 50 percent compared with about a 30 percent annual clip for his overall end user compute business. He expects to grow the ControlUp business at about a 50-75 percent rate every year into the foreseeable future. “There is a huge value in what ControlUp is doing,” he said of the ability to automatically remediate help desk issues.
Strohl said he expects ControlUp’s AI capabilities to automatically reduce help desk trouble tickets by more than 50 percent.
“Productivity earned is another 30 percent because users can continue to operate to do their jobs that are creating business outcomes without interruption,” he said. “What we are doing with ControlUp is replacing administrative roles by allowing AI to do things automatically, creating a better end user experience. ControlUp is shifting the end user experience away from dealing with technology and toward creating real business outcomes. If you’re in healthcare you get to focus on curing patients – not curing your PC. That is how money is going to be saved and the world is going to get better. That is why this is important!”
Mike Quirin, chief revenue officer for Alchemy Technology Group, Houston, Texas, a provider of disruptive technology solutions for enterprise customers, said Ayres’ success at ControlUp harkens back to his comments when Ayres took the position (“Everything Jed touches turns to gold”).
“Jed has this company cranking at $100 million ARR and a $1 billion valuation,” said Quirin. “He has transformed this from a company with good technology into a company with must-have technology. He’s a visionary who stakes to where the puck is going rather than where it has been. He makes businesses more relevant with disruptive technology.”
Quirin said he sees ControlUp becoming a bigger and bigger piece of Alchemy’s AI strategy going forward. “With what ControlUp is doing with AI the sky is the limit,” he said. “It’s all about who is first to the market with the right solution which I believe is ControlUp. I think adoption is going to go through the roof going forward.”
Ayres, for his part, also sees even faster growth ahead. “It took ControlUp 11 years to get to $100 million in recurring revenue,” he said. “Our goal is to add another $100 million in the next three years!”
