Small and medium-size businesses are often the last to gain access to new marketing technologies.
After all, complex tech is often expensive, and SMBs don’t have the same budgets as Fortune 1000 companies.
Pie, an AI-powered growth platform for SMBs, was built to give smaller businesses access to tools that historically felt out of reach, CEO and Co-Founder Syed Ali told AdExchanger.
Pie emerged from stealth in June, alongside a $19.5M Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. However, it was originally founded in August 2025, when it also raised its seed round.
How Pie makes its dough
Both Ali and his co-founder, Akhil Mantripragada, previously worked at restaurant point-of-sale platform Toast, and Ali spent several years before that at Square, another POS company.
Toast and Square both primarily serve SMBs. The pair’s goal was to use their experience to bring “affordable and accessible” AI solutions to those same businesses, Ali said.
Between Toast and Pie, Ali’s resume is starting to read like a menu. (What’s next? Brioche?)
The official reason behind the name reflects the company’s goal to “increase the share of the pie” for small businesses by providing them with affordable marketing resources, Ali said. But, he admitted, the word “pie” also lends itself to “so many bad puns.”
Pie’s clients pay between $300 and $500 monthly, according to Ali – a sharp contrast to the multiple thousands of dollars a larger agency might charge. Pie also fronts the cost of an initial campaign that serves as a free trial. It’s not cheap, Ali said, but, so far, the strategy has paid off.
Before emerging from stealth, Ali said, Pie had already surpassed 1,000 customers thanks to its free trial offer, and then satisfied customers – many of whom hadn’t previously been able to access or afford the latest AI marketing tech – would spread the word.
The main ingredients
Pie offers three products: paid advertising, AI search optimization and a “front desk” service that answers phone calls.
The paid ads product feeds transaction data from a brand’s CRM, as well as incoming calls, into Pie’s growth agent. The agent identifies trends, such as what time of day most people call and which types of people most often buy from the brand, and uses that information to determine what ads should say and when to run them.
But as more consumer discovery happens through AI search, running ads isn’t enough on its own. Its AI optimization tool is designed to improve the way that brands show up in AI search.
Most of Pie’s clients are service- and appointment-based businesses, like salons, auto repair shops, gyms and restaurants, so Google and Yelp are the main sources that LLMs pull from for information about them, Ali said.
Pie queries the major LLMs daily, asking which prompts result in a specific brand being mentioned. It also tracks broader query trends so marketers know what questions potential customers are asking. Then, Pie creates AI-generated brand websites that are specifically formatted to be “readable and accessible to crawlers,” said Ali, so LLMs can more easily pick up the brand’s message and mission.
The front desk tool, meanwhile, can take bookings over the phone and answer other routine questions, like inquiries about a business’s hours of operation and parking availability. Pie’s agent can handle roughly 90% of incoming questions, Ali said. But anything that requires judgment or a custom answer, like a large group booking or a question about allergy accommodations, for example, gets transferred to a human.
Since Pie connects to each client’s CRM, it has access to customer data and sees the types of questions customers ask and how the brand responds, said Ali. It also sets up a conversion tracking phone number for when people call via Google or Yelp, he added, and has access to the written transcripts from those calls. Pie trains on all of those sources to develop a voice agent that knows both what customers generally ask and the tone in which the brand responds.
The result, Ali said, is a big-time saver for many SMBs.
Hair salon franchise Supercuts, for instance, doesn’t have separate receptionists; instead, the hairstylists juggle phone calls as well as their styling jobs, Ali said. Since partnering with Pie, Supercuts has saved roughly four hours of talk time per day. The agent takes phone calls and manages bookings, which allows stylists to take on more customers and focus solely on cutting and styling hair.
It’s as easy as … well, you get the idea.
