Raised $32M and Quietly Hit $4M ARR in 18 Months — What Makes This “Phone AI” Special?
Beside: Reinventing the Phone for the AI Era
Beside has raised $32M to transform your phone into the core interface of the AI age.
Founder Maxime Germain — who sold his previous company for $20M — is now targeting the 100 million Americans whose jobs depend on phone calls.
After 18 months in stealth, Beside already counts 20,000 paying users who open the app 14 times a day. Some have grown revenue from $40K to $120K using it.
The phone is no longer just for answering calls — it’s becoming something more.
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Why Most AI Innovation Misses Real-Economy Workers
For workers making dozens of calls daily — contractors, real estate agents, truck dispatchers, small business owners — phone calls are the lifeblood of business. Yet, AI innovation largely focuses on knowledge workers.
Every deal, booking, and relationship starts on the phone.
Missed calls are missed opportunities:
- Small businesses answer < 40% of incoming calls.
- 80% of customers who hit voicemail never call back.
- Responding within 1 minute can triple or quadruple conversion rates in home services.
Beside is tackling this neglected trillion-dollar market by rebuilding telephony from scratch so AI can understand, record, and act on calls and messages.
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Making the Invisible Visible: Conversation Data as an Untapped Asset
Traditional AI tools optimize already-digitized work. For phone-reliant professionals, their most valuable data — conversations — vanish after the call.
Beside's solution:
- Not just an AI layer on old systems, but a rebuilt telephony stack.
- Integrates directly with phone networks to capture and act on every call and text.
- Users keep their existing numbers — no workflow change.
- Positions itself as a “Harvard-trained chief of staff with perfect memory.”
The result: AI that remembers details, books appointments, follows up, and manages client relationships like an executive assistant.
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Early Results: M1 to Beside
In stealth as M1, Beside built an AI receptionist.
By launch:
- 20,000 customers
- $4M ARR
- 4.8/5 from 4,500 reviews
- Half of users open the app 14 times/day, 6 days/week
Stages of evolution:
- Receptionist — handles calls/texts, books accurately, remembers details.
- Chief of Staff — preps for meetings, recalls past context, drafts follow-up.
- Business Partner — (roadmap) proactively finds insights, completes actions, drives revenue.
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Technical Moat: Owning the Telephony Infrastructure
Most competitors bolt AI onto existing systems. Beside rebuilt telephony:
- Number provisioning and porting.
- Compliance and high-quality calls anywhere.
- Millions of calls/month handled.
- Plans to become a full mobile operator with SIM integration.
Complex U.S. carrier/regulatory mastery creates a replicable global blueprint.
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Serving the Overlooked 100 Million
From contractors to pastors, the target is mindset-driven:
Anyone who values client experience and detailed conversations.
Customers report exponential growth when calls are never missed and every detail is remembered.
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Platform Ambition Beyond Productivity
Much like Shopify or Square, Beside aims to be real-world economic infrastructure, using conversation context to branch into payments, analytics, and satisfaction tracking.
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Consumer-Grade UX, Enterprise Capability
Co-founders’ background in consumer apps (e.g., Jour) informs Beside’s simple, intuitive interface — vital for workers without time for training.
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Funding & Investor Confidence
Raised:
- $20M Series A (EQT Ventures, Index Ventures)
- $10.5M Seed (Index)
- $1.4M SAFE
Angels: Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Clément Delangue (Hugging Face), Jean-Charles Samuelian (Alan).
From 100 to 20,000 customers, retention and engagement are exceptional.
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AI-Native Evolution & Global Expansion
Beside updates offerings with every LLM advancement, moving toward proactive, autonomous “business partner” capabilities.
Plans for Europe leverage founders’ roots and telephony stack adaptability.
Multilingual AI enables seamless entry across languages.
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Competitive Edge
Three differentiators:
- Market focus — real-economy frontline workers.
- Invisible AI — seamless background support, premium feel.
- Full-stack control — reliability + latency advantage.
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Privacy & Trust
Handling sensitive conversation data requires strong privacy measures and regulatory compliance — especially for GDPR in Europe.
Owning the stack allows potential for end-to-end encryption and local storage.
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Challenges & Opportunities
Scale quality, define automation boundaries, defend against competition, and build lasting moats (brand, habits, network effects).
Potential: become synonymous with Conversation-as-a-Service.
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Broader AI Ecosystem Connection
Platforms like AiToEarn share Beside’s philosophy: creating infrastructure for AI-driven work.
AiToEarn is an open-source global AI content monetization platform that:
- Generates & publishes AI content across Douyin, Kwai, WeChat, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, and X.
- Integrates analytics and AI模型排名.
Just as Beside captures and monetizes conversational workflows, AiToEarn helps creators monetize multi-platform content workflows.
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