Beside funding nets $32M to build an AI for the real economy

AI startup Beside is coming out of stealth with a fresh $32 million in Series A funding to build an intelligent assistant for everyone Silicon Valley’s AI boom has so far ignored. While most AI tools focus on knowledge workers and enterprise clients, Beside is targeting what its investors call the “real economy”—the millions of contractors, real estate agents, plumbers, and dispatchers who run their businesses from their phones.

The round was led by EQT Ventures, with participation from existing investor Index Ventures, who also led the company’s seed round. The funding will be used to scale Beside’s cross-platform AI, which essentially reimagines the phone’s native communication tools for the AI age. Instead of just making calls and sending texts, Beside captures these interactions to create a searchable, intelligent memory for a small business.

According to the company, which operated in stealth as M1 for the last 18 months, the product is already seeing significant traction. It has grown 30 percent month-over-month to 20,000 paying users, with a startlingly high engagement rate: half of its users log in an average of 14 times a day, six days a week.

An AI chief of staff for your phone

Beside’s pitch is that it starts as a smart receptionist—answering calls, logging details, and responding to leads—and evolves into a chief of staff. Users can ask conversational questions about their entire communication history, like “who likes the weird 4 bed bungalow with no windows,” and get an instant answer pulled from past calls and texts. It automates follow-ups, sends contextual reminders, and integrates with platforms like Salesforce, Zapier, and Monday.

The founding team, led by CEO Maxime Germain, isn't new to building sticky consumer-grade apps. Germain and his co-founders previously built the mental health journaling app Jour, which they sold to Alan for a reported $20 million. That background in intuitive mobile UX is apparent in Beside’s design, which investors say feels more like iMessage than clunky enterprise software.

In a blog post, Martin Mignot of Index Ventures noted he’s known Germain for over a decade and was drawn to his ambition to build a platform that could “change how millions of Americans work.” EQT Ventures echoed that sentiment, framing Beside as a company “enfranchising the long tail” in the same way Shopify did for e-commerce or HubSpot did for marketing.

The bet is that by providing enterprise-grade AI in a simple, accessible package, Beside can unlock a massive, underserved market of frontline professionals. For a landscaper in New Jersey quoted by the company, the value is simple: “Not being stressed about forgetting anything a customer wants is invaluable.” If Beside can deliver that peace of mind at scale, this $32 million is just the start.