Pie, an AI-powered growth platform for small businesses, has raised a $19.5 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $23.7 million. The round also included Capital One Ventures, Max Levchin’s SciFi VC, F-Prime, Commerce Ventures, Wex, and existing investors. Alongside the funding, the company emerged from stealth and introduced Front Desk, an AI tool designed to answer calls, take bookings, and respond to customer questions for local businesses.
Building Growth Infrastructure for Main Street
Founded by former Square and Toast operators Syed Ali and Akhil Mantripragada, Pie is focused on helping small businesses attract more customers rather than adding another operational tool to their workflow. The founders said their experience working with merchants revealed a recurring challenge: many owners struggled to access affordable and effective customer acquisition support. Pie was built around the idea that local businesses need growth technology that can directly improve discovery, demand generation, and conversion.
Small businesses have historically relied on agencies, fragmented marketing tools, and manual processes to manage customer acquisition. Traditional agencies can charge between $2,500 and $5,000 per month, often requiring long-term contracts and offering limited transparency into results. Pie is positioning its platform as a lower-cost alternative that gives merchants access to automated growth tools without requiring them to manage multiple channels themselves.
Expanding the Product Suite
Pie’s platform is organized around three products: Growth, AI Search, and Front Desk. Growth helps businesses acquire customers through local and high-intent channels such as Google Maps, Yelp, Nextdoor, and other digital platforms. AI Search is designed to improve visibility as customer discovery shifts toward AI-powered search tools including ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
The newly launched Front Desk product addresses another challenge for local businesses: missed calls and unanswered customer inquiries. The AI tool can respond to calls around the clock, take reservations and bookings, and answer routine questions when business owners or staff are unavailable. By combining discovery tools with call handling and conversion support, Pie aims to help merchants capture demand across the entire customer journey.
Early Customer Adoption
Pie said it has grown to approximately 2,000 small business customers since launching its first AI-powered growth product in late 2025. The company said much of this early traction came through referrals and partnerships with vertical software platforms. Its distribution model is designed to reach local merchants through platforms serving industries such as auto repair, pet care, and salons.
The company reported that its platform has driven more than 100,000 phone calls to small businesses. Pie also said customers typically see a 15% to 20% increase in year-over-year sales, although those figures were not independently verified. The company argues that AI tools will be most valuable to small businesses when they are tied to outcomes that owners can measure, including calls, bookings, and revenue.
Investor Support and Expansion Plans
Lightspeed’s investment reflects broader investor interest in AI tools designed for small and medium-sized businesses. While enterprise companies have increasingly adopted AI-powered software, many local merchants remain underserved because of cost, limited technical resources, and the complexity of managing separate marketing systems. Pie believes this creates an opportunity to bring enterprise-style growth capabilities to a much wider base of businesses.
The Series A funding will support Pie’s platform partnerships, product development, and team expansion. The company plans to deepen its AI product suite while scaling distribution through embedded partnerships with vertical software providers. Pie is also looking to build a stronger presence across industries where businesses depend heavily on local search, phone inquiries, bookings, and repeat customer demand.
Pie’s funding round gives the company additional resources to expand its AI-powered growth platform for small businesses. Its strategy combines local discovery, AI search visibility, campaign optimization, and automated customer engagement in one system. As local businesses face more fragmented consumer discovery across maps, search engines, AI assistants, and digital marketplaces, Pie is betting that integrated growth tools will become increasingly important.