Last Updated: 30 June 2026
Pie, a startup building AI-powered growth tools for small businesses, is betting that customer acquisition will increasingly run through AI assistants rather than traditional search listings. Founded by former Square and Toast operators Syed Ali and Akhil Mantripragada, the company spent the months since late 2025 quietly building what it calls the growth infrastructure layer for Main Street businesses, the software a local merchant needs to get found, win new customers, and turn that interest into paying business.
That bet rests on a shift in consumer behavior that is moving fast. Adoption of AI tools for finding local businesses jumped from 6 percent to 45 percent of consumers in a single year, according to BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey. For a shop owner who built a reputation through Google reviews and word of mouth, a swing that size changes the rules of customer discovery almost overnight, and it helps explain why investors are paying close attention to companies trying to solve the problem.
Pie announced a $19.5 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $23.7 million. Capital One Ventures, Max Levchin's SciFi VC, F-Prime, Commerce Ventures, WEX Venture Capital, and the company's existing investors also took part.
Most local merchants have never had access to the growth tools larger companies take for granted. Agencies that build websites, manage listings, and run ad campaigns often charge between $2,500 and $5,000 a month, with long contracts and little visibility into results. For a single location business, that cost eats into already thin margins, leaving many owners to either skip professional marketing or manage it themselves on top of everything else running a business demands.
Most existing software for small businesses also focuses on managing customers a business already has rather than finding new ones. That gap matters more now that platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Maps, and Yelp have become places people decide where to spend their money, not just somewhere to look something up. A business that looks great on its own website but never comes up when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation is, in practical terms, invisible to a growing share of potential customers.
“Pie is bringing AI to Main Street by starting with one of the biggest pain points for small business owners: finding new customers. 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.”
Aaron Frank, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
The new capital will go toward scaling Pie's distribution model, expanding its product suite, and growing its team as the company builds out its growth infrastructure for Main Street businesses. Pie reaches small businesses both directly and through embedded partnerships with the software platforms specific industries already use.
That strategy is already producing results. Pie has formed a partnership with Tekmetric, an auto repair technology platform serving more than 15,000 shops, and plans to extend the same approach into pet care, fitness, and beauty services. For software partners, Pie becomes an added growth layer inside the platform merchants already use, giving them new ways to win customers while creating extra revenue for the partner itself.
Pie says the funding will also deepen its three core products, AI Search, Growth, and Front Desk, as it works toward combining embedded distribution, local business data, and AI-powered automation into one platform built for what it considers a large and underserved market.
Pie Tech Inc. was founded by Syed Ali, who serves as CEO, and Akhil Mantripragada. Together, the two founders spent 15 years building products for small businesses at companies including Square and Toast before starting Pie. The company began building its first AI-powered growth product in late 2025 and operated largely out of public view until this announcement, reaching thousands of customers in that period mostly through referrals and platform partnerships.
Pie's platform is built around three products. AI Search helps a business appear when people ask AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for a local recommendation. Growth wins customers through channels like Google Maps, Yelp, and Nextdoor. Front Desk is an AI tool that answers a business's phone calls at any hour, takes bookings and reservations, and responds to common customer questions, work a small front desk team could otherwise handle only during business hours.
According to the company, customers typically see a 15 to 20 percent increase in year over year sales after adopting the platform, and Pie says it has driven more than 100,000 phone calls to small businesses across the platform so far.
“Small business owners have been stuck with expensive, opaque agency models for decades. 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.”
Syed Ali, Co-founder and CEO, Pie
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the $19.5 million Series A, with participation from Capital One Ventures, Max Levchin's SciFi VC, F-Prime, Commerce Ventures, WEX Venture Capital, and the company's existing investors. Combined with funding raised before this round, Pie has now brought in $23.7 million in total.
“Small businesses are notoriously hard to build for and even harder to reach, 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.”
Max Levchin, Founder of Affirm and PayPal
The investor group brings together venture firms with deep roots in payments and small business technology, a background that lines up closely with the founders' own time at Square and Toast.