BESIDE RAISES $32M TO TURN TRILLIONS OF CALLS AND TEXTS INTO GROWTH FOR EVERYDAY BUSINESSES AND BUILD THE UNIVERSAL CONVERSATION LAYER FOR AI
Beside brings AI to the 100 million Americans who work by phone, starting as a smart assistant that handles calls and texts, and evolving into a trusted business partner that applies that context across meetings, emails, and other systems.
With 20,000+ paying customers, it’s already becoming indispensable for businesses across the U.S. Half of Beside’s users are using it 14 times per day on average, six days a week.
Beside was cofounded by Maxime Germain and the team who previously built Jour, a mental health app acquired by digital health insurance provider Alan for $20 million.
Index Ventures led the seed round, EQT led the Series A, with participation from historical investors as ISAI and notable angels include Stewart Butterfield, Clément Delangue, and Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve.
November 11, 2025 — Over 100 million Americans work on the frontlines of the real economy, from contractors and dispatchers to real estate agents and small business owners. For them, work happens over the phone. Yet the conversations where jobs are booked, relationships are built, and revenue is made have remained largely invisible to AI.
Beside is changing that. The company has rebuilt the phone for the AI age, capturing every call and text, and turning them into action. While most AI today serves the 10% who work behind screens, Beside is built for the 90% who keep the real economy running. Phone and SMS are the entry point; that same conversation context will flow across meetings, emails, and other systems so AI can act with full understanding as a true business partner to millions of everyday Americans.
Today, Beside announced $32 million in funding, with a Series A led by EQT Ventures and joined by Index Ventures, which led the seed round. Angel investors include Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Clément Delangue (Hugging Face), and Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (Alan).
Closing the gap in the real economy
AI has transformed how knowledge workers manage documents, emails, and meetings. But for the millions of Americans who run businesses like real estate agencies and home services companies on their phones and not behind a desk, little has changed.
Most small businesses answer fewer than 40% of incoming calls, and four out of five callers who reach voicemail never try again. In industries like home services, responding within a minute can quadruple conversion rates. Meanwhile, consumers increasingly prefer SMS, especially for time-sensitive updates. Every missed conversation adds up to missed context, missed revenue, and lower customer satisfaction.
“AI shouldn’t be for tech tourists—it should be for the millions of real Americans who are too busy working the phones to switch tools,” says Maxime Germain, Beside’s founder and CEO. “A plumber and a priest may have very different jobs, but they share the same needs: capture conversations, follow through fast, and deliver a great customer experience.”
“Beside is building the conversation layer AI that has been missing—one that spans calls, texts, meetings, and business systems with real context and continuity,” says Martin Mignot, Partner at Index Ventures. “At the heart of it is a founder in Maxime who’s channeling his expertise and passion for building world-class consumer products into a unified platform for how small businesses communicate and operate.”
From receptionist to Chief of Staff to business partner, via true multiplatform AI
Beside is the first cross-platform AI built to serve the real economy, changing the way people and businesses use their phones, without asking them to change how they work.
Available on iOS, Android, macOS, and soon Windows, Beside is a fully horizontal solution that meets users where they are. It starts as a smart receptionist—answering calls, responding to texts, and logging details. From there, it evolves into a Chief of Staff that remembers context, automates follow-ups, and coordinates schedules. As it learns, it becomes a trusted partner, anticipating next steps, surfacing insights, and making recommendations to help users grow their business. All of it happens through a simple, consumer-grade interface that feels more like a messaging app than enterprise software.
“We think of it like hiring a Harvard-grad Chief of Staff with a perfect memory,” says Germain. “Over time, it becomes a trusted partner who understands your customers, owns the follow-through, and helps you win more business.”
“We back companies solving real problems today with the potential to reshape entire markets tomorrow and with Beside, we saw both,” says Kaushik Subramanian, Partner at EQT Ventures. “It’s designed for the real economy: the millions of workers who rely on their phone to do business, not dashboards and boardroom meetings. The AI-native solution is smart, simple and intuitive for everyday users. But what truly stood out was the ambition. Beside isn’t just optimizing communications between businesses and customers, it’s completely rethinking how work gets done.”
Out of stealth and into customers’ hands with strong traction
For the past 18 months, Beside operated in stealth under the name M1, reaching $4 million in annual recurring revenue, with 30% month-over-month growth over the last six months. Today, more than 20,000 paying customers use Beside, with half of those users logging into the platform an average of 14 times a day, six days a week.
“Not being stressed about forgetting anything a customer wants is invaluable,” says Dominic Santiago of Good Mowin’, a commercial landscaping business based in New Jersey. “It keeps everything on track and changes the experience of running my business completely.”
“I went from $40,000 in new written premium to $120,000 overnight, just by myself,” says Tim Curts, co-owner of a Ventura-based insurance agency under TWFG Insurance Services. “The only way I’m able to sustain that today is because of Beside. It lets me work on the business, not just in it. I can train people, manage growth, and still make sure every customer gets the best experience possible.”
Rebuilding the phone from the ground up
Rather than layering AI on top of existing tools, Beside started deeper: by reimagining the phone itself. Its sophisticated telephony infrastructure powers and captures millions of calls per month. It provisions and verifies numbers, meets complex regulatory requirements, and supports call forwarding and porting so businesses can keep the numbers their customers already know.
Owning the phone rail creates a unique stream of structured, real-time intent—the substrate for reliable, action-oriented AI. As the system captures more conversations, that context compounds, unlocking a persistent memory that allows Beside to personalize each interaction, anticipate needs, and deepen customer relationships over time.
While other startups chase productivity use cases for office workers, Beside is quietly disrupting a legacy communications layer and creating a technical moat around one of the most universal business tools: the phone number. Longer term, the company plans to go even deeper, becoming a full mobile carrier and offering SIM-level performance and context.
“Delivering high-quality calls anywhere—in a truck, on a job site, across a busy city—is a really hard technical challenge,” says Germain. “By mastering the U.S.’s complex regulatory and carrier ecosystem, we’ve built a blueprint we can replicate globally, adapting to local requirements while maintaining the same level of reliability and quality.”
A team built to go deep
Germain taught himself to code at age 11, launching France’s most popular iPhone tutorial site by 15. After dropping out of school and founding several startups in New York, he sold mental health app Jour to Alan in 2021 for $20 million. It was during his time at Alan that he began exploring how LLMs could enhance therapist-patient interactions—an idea that quickly became the foundation for Beside and spurred him back into entrepreneurship.
At Beside, Germain’s co-founders include Bobby Giangeruso (Product), Aymeric Beaumet (CTO), Justin Bureau (Product), and Helene Blonz (Growth), all of whom worked with him at Jour. Today, the 30-person team includes former leaders and engineers from Hugging Face, Snap, and X. The new funding will accelerate R&D, giving Beside’s team the runway to go even deeper into the problems they’ve been solving for years.
About Beside
Beside is a cross-platform AI that helps businesses turn every call and text into action—booking jobs, following up with clients, and capturing context automatically. Today, Beside serves U.S. customers and is available on iOS, macOS, and Android, with Windows coming soon.
The company was founded by Maxime Germain (CEO), Bobby Giangeruso (Product), Aymeric Beaumet (CTO), Justin Bureau (Product) & Helene Blonz (Growth). The team previously built Jour, a mental health app acquired by Alan for $20 million.
Investors include EQT Ventures, Index Ventures, Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Clement Delangue (Hugging Face), Ben Silbermann (Pinterest), NextView Ventures, ISAI, Volo Ventures, Factorial Capital, Mathilde Colin (Front), Pierre Valade (Sunrise), Antoine Martin (Zenly/Amo), and Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (Alan).