Why We Invested in Pie
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It’s Tuesday morning at an independent auto repair shop. The owner is under a lifted F-150, two bays deep into a transmission job she’s decided to tackle herself. Meanwhile, two miles away, someone searches “auto repair open now” on Google Maps. Three shops appear and one has a live offer: “$10 off your first diagnostic.” That shop gets the call.
Back at our independent auto shop, the phone rings but nobody answers because the owner is busy. Now, a quote request will sit unread until Thursday.
This is the local business growth problem in 2026. It isn’t just about missed calls. It’s about being present at the precise moment a customer decides where to spend their money. Companies with strong omnichannel engagement grow at nearly 3x the rate of those without it. The businesses that show up first, with the right offer, at the right moment, win.
Nearly 6M employer businesses in the United States run lean with fewer than 20 employees and 73% aren’t confident their marketing strategy is working. The National Federation of Independent Business 2025 survey found that keeping up with new technology is “often difficult” in ways that affect their ability to compete. What small business owners need isn’t another tool that they need to learn and manage. They need one platform that puts them in front of customers at the moment of intent, converts that intent into a visit, and proves it happened.
That’s what Pie is building.
The Problem No One Had Solved
Brick-and-mortar businesses have been locked out of the closed-loop attribution that makes digital advertising defensible. Without proof that an ad drove an in-store visit, there’s no optimization. Without optimization, spend stays low: more than 66% of small business owners spend less than $1,000 per year on marketing. Legacy vendors helped businesses show up but never connected the ad to the transaction. Agencies priced out most local operators and stayed disconnected from the data that would prove ROI. Neither approach touched the moment of intent. That’s the gap Pie was built to close.
Pie: Small Business Growth Done Right
The only way to prove an ad drove an in-store visit is to own the full stack, from the moment the ad runs to the moment the customer pays. No platform has solved for that complete experience. Pie built it.
The foundation is AI-powered ad creation using POS data. Pie compresses Google Ads campaign setup from 18 steps to 5, generating relevant campaigns in minutes with no expertise required. The bigger differentiation is point-of-intent engagement. Pie was first to market with live consumer offers on Google Maps and Google Search, appearing in results when a customer is actively searching nearby. The offer from the competing shop that was on Google Maps, the one that got the call instead of our owner? That’s Pie.
Now, when someone is looking for “coffee shop near me and open” doesn’t just see a listing, they see an offer that pulls them through the door. Because Pie manages both the advertising and the POS data, the attribution is automatic and precise. Early customers are seeing an average 7x return on ad spend, with full visibility into exactly why.
From that foundation, the platform grows outward. Pie’s AI Search product positions businesses to win AI-generated local recommendations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. With AI Overviews appearing in 68% of local searches, this surface is no longer optional. Pie’s AI Front Desk answers inbound calls around the clock and books appointments automatically, capturing the 62% of calls local businesses currently miss.
“Pie has made local marketing incredibly simple to manage across our 65 salons. Most importantly, we’re driving double-digit year-over-year sales growth across our locations.” — Moxie Group, Supercuts Franchisee
“We’re seeing more revenue, calls, and walk-ins with over 300 store visits so far!” — Rosa Serdar, Owner, Noor Beautique
Why Syed and Akhil Have the Right to Win
We first met Syed through one of our largest institutional LPs who grew up with him and remained friends. Syed had just moved to Houston, was running business development for Toast’s innovation team, and was looking to connect with individuals in Houston’s tech ecosystem. Blair Garrou first met Syed and introduced him to the rest of the Mercury team. Syed attended a few of Mercury’s networking events, became close with our partnership, including Mercury Venture Partner Eddie Lou, and eventually told us that he and his Toast colleague Akhil were thinking of starting a new AI native retail tech company targeting SMBs.
Blair Garrou had spent years building deep experience in retail and adtech, and I had spent my career in SMB distribution and channel partnerships, and Eddie had deep experience as an entrepreneur and angel investor in the sector. When we learned of what would eventually become Pie, we weren’t learning the problem for the first time. We already had a thesis around the local commerce gap and a clear view of why the attribution problem had never been solved at this layer. As Syed and Akhil discussed and formulated their plans for launch, it didn’t take very long for us to understand that what they were building was exactly what we’d been waiting for. We went deep fast, and within days, we signed a term sheet to invest.
The speed of that conviction wasn’t impatience. It was pattern recognition. Syed and Akhil met on Toast’s New Business Solutions team, Syed as SeniorSr. Director of Business Development, evaluating what the company should build and what to pass on, Akhil as Engineering Lead, building the products that cleared that bar. Together, their team built and launched three scaling products at Toast, including two first-to-market AI products. That’s proof they’ve shipped complex, novel products in a competitive environment before, together. Prior to Toast, Syed then led payments strategy and partnerships at Square, developing the distribution capability that now sits at the core of how Pie scales without a linear sales force. Akhil arrived at Toast as a serial founder with two successful exits already behind him and more than ten launched products to his name.
Because we’re all former operators at Mercury, we know what early momentum looks like, and more importantly, we know how founders respond when it arrives faster than expected. Some freeze. Others move. WhatOver the first few months of our investment, we watched Syed and Akhil do was the latter, consistently and without drama. When multiple contract opportunities came in at once, Syed worked them in parallel without losing focus. When the product needed to scale faster than a domestic team could manage, Akhil stood up a development team in India practically overnight. Both of them are doing exactly what they were built for, at the same time, without being told. Whatever was thrown at them, they handled it like they’d been there before. Because in many ways, they had.
We weren't the only ones who saw it.
“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 Bigger Bet: a $100B+ Market
Mercury's current working thesis is that the most durable value in vertical AI won’t be provided by the frontier LLMs. It will be built by startups with domain expertise that go deep in a specific industry, understanding how heir target markets actually work at the ground level, and automating workflows from the ground up with AI at the center. Not adding AI features to existing products, but rebuilding the workflow entirely. Pie fits that frame precisely.
The closed-loop growth platform Pie is building today addresses an initial market we estimate at $25-$50 billion. But the roadmap points somewhere larger. The vision is Pie as the AI-powered operating hub for the small business: an Ads Agent that creates and manages campaigns autonomously, a Marketing Agent that runs customer communication across email and SMS, a Support Agent that handles inbound queries, and an Accounting Agent that automates bookkeeping and compliance. Each plugs into the web and software platform's local businesses already use, and - with Pie sitsanchored at the center, running the whole operation. That expanded vision targets a market well north of $100 billion.
The path from here to there runs through trust. Local businesses are skeptical buyers. They’ve been burned by agencies, overwhelmed by platforms, and left without proof that any of it worked. Pie earns that trust by delivering measurable ROI from day one: every dollar of ad spend is tracked, every in-store visit is attributed, every missed call is captured. Once a business owner sees that loop close, Pie becomes the last platform they need.
This is exactly the kind of company Mercury Fund seeks to back: AI native founders with deep domain expertise, applying their knowledge and networks to rebuilding and automating a series of workflows to a highly receptive market. Many coastal investors have never thought seriously about this market. We have.
The auto repair shop owner under that F-150 deserves the same growth infrastructure that a national chain takes for granted. Pie is building it for her.
We’re proud to back Syed, Akhil, and the entire Pie team. Congratulations to them on closing a $19.5M Series A!
