Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pie’s $19.5M Series A brings total funding to $23.7M and will help the company scale its platform partnerships and AI product suite across growth, local discovery and customer conversion.

NEW YORK, NY, June 30, 2026 – Pie, the AI-powered growth platform for small businesses, today announced a $19.5 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $23.7 million. The round included participation from Capital One Ventures, Max Levchin’s SciFi VC, F-Prime, Commerce Ventures, WEX Venture Capital, and existing investors. The company also announced its emergence from stealth and launched Front Desk, an AI product that answers calls for small business owners 24/7, takes bookings and reservations, and responds to customer questions. 

Founded by former Square and Toast operators Syed Ali and Akhil Mantripragada, Pie is building the growth infrastructure layer for Main Street businesses at a time when customer discovery is shifting across AI search, Google and digital channels. Ali and Mantripragada spent the last 15 years collectively building products for small businesses, where they heard the same pain point again and again: owners did not need another tool. They needed more customers. 

Pie was built to solve that problem directly, helping small businesses get found, capture demand and convert customer intent into revenue.

Since launching its first AI-powered growth product in late 2025, Pie has grown to reach thousands of small business customers while in stealth, largely through referrals and platform partnerships, and expanded its product suite across AI Search, Growth, and Front Desk.

Small businesses represent one of the largest and most underserved software markets, but most local merchants have historically been priced out of enterprise-grade growth tools or forced to rely on agencies that can charge $2,500 to $5,000 per month, require long-term contracts and offer limited transparency. Many existing tools focus on managing current customers, while Pie is focused on helping businesses generate net-new demand from sources like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Maps, Meta & Yelp. Pie gives SMBs access to an always-on growth platform that can optimize profiles, create content to improve local discovery across different channels and capture customer demand at a fraction of traditional agency costs, without requiring owners to manage multiple tools or channels themselves.

“Small business owners have been stuck with expensive, opaque agency models for decades,” said Syed Ali, Co-founder and CEO, Pie. “Every owner I talked to said some version of the same thing: ‘I need more customers, and I can’t afford an agency.’ We built Pie to fix that problem and bring enterprise-grade growth capabilities to the small businesses that power local economies.”

Pie’s platform is built around three products. AI Search helps businesses show up as local discovery moves into AI-powered search experiences like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Growth then helps businesses acquire customers across high-intent local channels like Google Maps, Yelp, Nextdoor and other digital platforms. Front Desk helps businesses capture demand once it comes in by answering calls, taking bookings and responding to customer questions. Together, the products are designed to help small businesses create demand, improve discoverability and convert customer intent into revenue.

“Pie is bringing AI to Main Street by starting with one of the biggest pain points for small business owners: finding new customers,” said Aaron Frank, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Customer acquisition is a powerful entry point, but the broader vision is to build an AI platform that can support small businesses across more of their daily operations over time. Syed and Akhil have built a product that solves an immediate revenue problem today while laying the foundation for something much larger.” 

Pie reaches small businesses both directly and through embedded partnerships with vertical software platforms, giving the company a distribution model designed to scale across categories like auto repair, pet care, fitness and beauty services. For SaaS partners, Pie turns their platform into an integrated growth suite that helps merchants acquire new customers while supporting retention, incremental SaaS revenue and double-digit increases in transaction-based revenue.

“Small businesses are notoriously hard to build for and even harder to reach,” said Max Levchin, Founder of Affirm and PayPal, “but the Pie team seems to have the rare combination of founder-market fit, distribution strategy, and product velocity to win this historically challenging market.”

For early customers, Pie has delivered measurable revenue impact by helping merchants generate more calls, bookings and new revenue. Across the platform, Pie has driven more than 100,000 phone calls to small businesses, and customers typically see a 15 to 20% increase in year-over-year sales. The traction reflects Pie’s broader thesis: AI is most valuable for small businesses when it is tied to outcomes they can measure, from calls and bookings to new revenue.

“Pie has made local marketing incredibly simple to manage across our 65 salons,” said Jason Siska, Vice President of Moxie Management Group, a major Supercuts franchise operator. “The platform’s intuitive UI allows us to launch campaigns quickly and get locations up and running in a fraction of the time it takes with traditional agencies. We maintain full control over our monthly spend, avoid expensive agency retainers, and consistently see measurable results. Most importantly, we’re driving double-digit year-over-year sales growth across our locations.”

“At Tekmetric, we’re focused on helping auto repair shop owners grow their businesses, not just run them,” said Sunil Patel, Founder & CEO, Tekmetric, a leading auto repair technology company serving over 15,000 auto repair shops. “Pie’s approach to digital growth marketing aligns closely with that vision by helping shops reach more local customers, generate demand, and drive incremental revenue in a way that is simple for businesses. Together, we’re bringing a practical, data-driven growth solution to the independent auto repair industry.”

The Series A will help Pie scale its platform distribution model, deepen its product suite and grow its team as it builds the growth infrastructure layer for Main Street businesses. By combining embedded distribution, local business data and AI-powered automation, Pie is positioning itself to serve a large, underserved market of merchants that need measurable growth without added complexity.

About Pie

Pie is the AI-powered growth platform for small businesses. Through Growth, AI Search and Front Desk, Pie helps local merchants get discovered, bring in more customers and convert demand into revenue across the channels where customers are already looking. Learn more at getpie.com

Contacts
Pie@avenuez.com

SOURCE: http://www.intelligence360.io
Copyright (c) 2026 SI360 Inc. All rights reserved.