For more than a hundred million Americans, from plumbers to hairdressers, from drivers to real estate agents, the telephone remains the central tool of work. This is the market segment that Beside, a startup born in Paris and now based in the United States, wants to address, and which aims to rebuild the telephone for the AI era.
Founded by Maxime Germain, Beside is developing a voice assistant capable of answering calls, retaining the context of exchanges, managing appointments and sending confirmations, while learning from interactions to automate follow-ups. Accessible on iOS, Android and macOS, the application integrates directly with the user’s phone number without modifying their existing infrastructure.
“Max is a native founder of artificial intelligence, passionate about new things, constantly experimenting and always at the limit of what technology allows. » says Martin Mignot, VC at Index Ventures.
A conversational memory for field workers
The application captures every call and message, then transforms them into actionable information: task reminders, reminders, customer preferences, conversation history. Users can also clone their voice so that the assistant responds for them, creating a continuity of experience between human and machine.
After eighteen months of development under the M1 name, Beside claims more than twenty thousand paying customers. Half of them log in fourteen times a day, six days a week, generating an annual recurring income of 3.4 million euros.
Rethinking telephony at the source
Rather than layering AI on top of existing infrastructure, Beside rebuilt telephony from the ground up. The startup manages number provisioning, regulatory compliance, redirection and portability, to control the quality and continuity of communications. The company already handles several million calls per month.
This technical mastery allows Beside to transform the telephone into an active intelligence layer, capable of analyzing exchanges in real time, generating automatic follow-ups and enriching customer data without manual intervention.
27.2 million euros to accelerate R&D and international expansion
Beside raised $32 million, or approximately €27.2 million, in a funding round led by EQT Ventures, with the participation of Index Ventures, and ISAI with the participation of business angels Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Clément Delangue (Hugging Face) and Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (Alan). This fundraising brings the total capital to nearly 40 million dollars since creation.
The funds will be used to strengthen research and development, deepen telephone infrastructure towards mobile operator capabilities and prepare for international expansion.
Founded by Maxime Germain, creator of the mental health application Jour sold to Alan in 2021, Beside employs around thirty people spread between Paris and the United States. The company, which currently operates in the American market, is preparing its deployment in Europe from 2026.
