Beside is out of stealth and we can finally stop dodging the questions around the AI product that we believe brings real value to the world beyond techbros, but could not name!

Investing on the forefront of AI applications, we found most value being created either for knowledge workers or enterprise environments. There has been a relative shortage of applications that fit the needs of small businesses, specifically operated by frontline professionals who spend more time communicating either in real life or on the phone. Think contractors, real-estate agents and dispatchers.

Beside captures these under-leveraged touchpoints to build an interface for AI solutions for the real economy. They have rebuilt the phone for the AI age, enabling their users to leverage the power of intelligent retrieval and agentic actions over everyday texts and conversations. The product has a multiplicative impact on its users who now use AI to respond and book business from every single incoming call, get contextual reminders and can ask questions like “who likes the weird 4 bed bungalow with no windows” over the universe of all their conversations. 

And it doesn’t stop at SMBs, it supports cross-platform functionalities (ex. AI over desktop conversations) required to scale to knowledge workers and builds towards a future where frontline workers are empowered by AI connected to enterprise knowledge. 

This shows in consumer love! 🫶

The product has grown 30% monthly over the past 6 months to reach 20,000 paying users, with half of those users logging into the platform an average of 14 times a day, six days a week.

We are excited and grateful to be a part of this journey as Series A lead investors.

Our enthusiasm for Beside predates a lot of above mentioned product and metric development, a bit on that below.

Enfranchising the long tail

We have been on a hunt for products that marry enterprise grade performance with consumer grade experience and accessibility for the prosumer. Up until now, long tail businesses have missed out on enterprise grade tooling. However, with scalability brought by automation and AI, tooling can become relevant, and economically viable, for small businesses, micro SMEs, prosumers and frontline workers within enterprises.

Enfranchising the long tail has created a long list of generation-defining companies (Shopify, Uber, Wolt, Hubspot, Brex), and if the prosumer has access to enterprise grade software, the prosumer/employer/future of work landscape could look very different versus today.

Right in our first meeting, it was clear that the Beside team had the resolve to build for SMBs the experiences that they deserve and need in the AI age to keep up with enterprises.

Case for horizontal assistant

Having modelled building blocks of AI assistants for SMBs, we believed that there’s a critical mass of constituent layers like memory, triggers, agents and integrations to build a horizontal solution that scales across industries, and builds a brand recall for the product that helps SMBs do more with AI.

We were in resonance with the team's philosophy of a platformised approach where they were building best solutions for these horizontal layers and integrating as much as possible on vertical solutions. They already have integrations live with Zapier, Monday CRM, Odoo, Salesforce and many more, some power users are already building on top of them. :)

Earliest spikes on problem framing, ambition and technology

We first met the team – Maxime Germain (CEO), Bobby Giangeruso (Product), Aymeric Beaumet (CTO), Justin Bureau (Product) and Hélène Blonz (Growth), when they had just over a 100 customers. We were blown away by their bar on product quality and hypothesis driven approach. Anything less than planet scale adoption was not up for discussion!

One of the most memorable conversations was when the team explained (and technically modelled) CRM in a way that our grandmothers could understand. It was clear that the team is building for a world where SMBs get all the technical firepower and get to believe in magic of Beside without having to bother what’s in the background.

Finally, even at 100 user scale retrieval of information had better latency and performance than numerous other AI products which were already at a massive scale! 

We are grateful to the Beside team for letting us be a part of this journey. You can join in too – https://www.beside.com/careers