SMB growth platform Pie announced today that it has secured funding from Amex Ventures. This follows quickly behind the company’s June launch and $19.5 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other backers in that round included Capital One Ventures and Max Levchin’s SciFi VC.
So what does Pie do? It helps SMBs get discovered and acquire customers by converting demand into calls and other inbound activity. It then converts inbound leads into new business. The entire process is automated through lead optimization, automatic responses, and booking/scheduling tools.
To that end, Pie’s approach is to partner with existing platforms that SMBs use – everything from POS to CRM. For example, Pie partners with MoeGo, a best-of-breed platform in the pet care vertical. There, it drove more than 100,000 phone calls to pet-care SMBs and achieved an average 15x return on ad spend.
“Amex Ventures understands that small businesses do not need more software to manage. They need technology that drives growth,” Pie co-founder and CEO Syed Ali told Localogy Insider. “This investment will help us bring that model to more businesses through the platforms they already use.”
Not Another Dashboard
All the above aligns with a growing chorus that asserts SMBs don’t want more software and they don’t want another dashboard. They just want to turn leads into revenue, and they want it to be automated. Pie says that it has already helped individual SMBs achieve 15-20 percent year-over-year sales growth.
The company does all this by unifying and making sense of the fragmented SMB media mix. That includes everything from SEO to email marketing. This is often too much for SMBs to manage well, so the idea is to automate it into one AI platform and simply deliver new business and bookings.
This involves three main components in Pie’s platform.
- AI Search helps businesses improve their visibility as local discovery shifts to AI-powered search experiences like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
- Growth helps businesses acquire customers across high-intent local channels like Google Maps, Yelp and Nextdoor
- Front Desk uses a voice agent to answer calls, take bookings and respond to customer questions.
As for what Pie will do with the cash infusion, the company says that it will double down on growth, including investments in the platform, product roadmap, partnerships, and team. That likely boils down to more hires that we can expect in the near term in both product and business development.
Do More with Less
Backing up, Pie sits within a crop of players that treat AI as a way to democratize big-company marketing and operations. This is one of the many opportune segments of the AI movement, as the technology can help the sizable SMB universe do more with less, and address longstanding pain points.
Put another way, AI is a technology that has the rare potential to transcend hype and tech-world platitudes by actually appealing to tech-challenged SMBs. That’s simply because it speaks their language in resolving constraints, and offering them the most valuable and scarce resource of all: time.
Other players aiming for a similar target include Vendasta and its AI employees (more about those in an article later this week). Meanwhile, SOCi is helping local franchisees automate customer communications with LLMs. And Thryv continues to develop AI tools that democratize advanced marketing capabilities.
That only scratches the surface of the AI integrations in the Localogyverse. The common thread is democratization and breaking down classic SMB resource constraints. The winners at the intersection of AI and SMBs will be those that deliver smart operational automations and tangible results.
“We believe the next generation of AI for small businesses should take on more of the work of customer acquisition,” said Ali, “and be judged by whether it delivers calls, bookings, and revenue.”
