AI startup Beside has emerged from stealth with a $32 million Series A round, aiming to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence and the real-world professionals who power small and mid-sized businesses. The funding round, led by investors who describe themselves as “on the forefront of AI applications,” marks a significant step toward expanding AI utility beyond enterprise environments and knowledge workers.
While most AI solutions have focused on enterprise and white-collar use cases, Beside is targeting what it calls “the real economy”—frontline professionals such as contractors, real estate agents, and dispatchers who primarily communicate in person or by phone.
Beside’s platform “rebuilds the phone for the AI age,” enabling users to apply intelligent retrieval and agentic actions over their everyday texts and calls. The result, according to the company, is a “multiplicative impact” that allows users to respond to and book business from every incoming call, receive contextual reminders, and query their communication histories—asking, for instance, “who likes the weird 4-bed bungalow with no windows?”
The company’s cross-platform design supports AI functionalities across devices and desktop applications, connecting frontline work with enterprise knowledge systems.
Beside reports 30% monthly growth over the past six months, reaching 20,000 paying users, half of whom log in an average of 14 times per day, six days a week. The company attributes this traction to a strong product-market fit and a growing demand for AI tools tailored to small businesses.
The investors describe Beside’s mission as “enfranchising the long tail”—bringing enterprise-grade performance and automation to the prosumer and small business sectors. Historically underserved by enterprise software economics, these users now stand to benefit from scalable AI tools made accessible through automation.
“Enfranchising the long tail has created a long list of generation-defining companies,” the authors wrote, citing Shopify, Uber, Wolt, HubSpot, and Brex as examples. “If prosumers have access to enterprise-grade software, the future of work could look very different.”
Beside’s approach is rooted in building a horizontal AI assistant that spans industries through key functional layers—memory, triggers, agents, and integrations. The company already integrates with Zapier, Monday CRM, Odoo, Salesforce, and other tools, allowing SMBs to adopt AI-driven workflows seamlessly.
Beside’s team includes Maxime Germain (CEO), Bobby Giangeruso (Product), Aymeric Beaumet (CTO), Justin Bureau (Product), and Hélène Blonz (Growth). The investors say their early conviction came from the team’s “resolve to build for SMBs the experiences they deserve in the AI age” and their “planet-scale” ambition.
Even at 100 users, Beside’s AI retrieval engine demonstrated superior latency and performance compared to larger incumbents, signaling strong technical foundations.
