AI for the Real Economy: Our Investment in Beside

Back in 2012, years before we opened our New York office, I used to stay for one month of the year with my best friend Kenneth Schlenker and work out of his company’s loft in TriBeca. It was a startup called Gertrude that hosted pop-up art salons. One of the highlights of those trips was talking to his co-founder and Head of Product, a precocious 20-year-old named Maxime Germain.

Newly arrived from Paris, Max was one of those incredibly intense, driven wunderkinds you sometimes meet in Silicon Valley, but don’t often see in France. He’d taught himself to code at 11, launched France’s most popular iPhone tutorial site at 15, and dropped out of school to chase his entrepreneurial dreams in New York. Just talking to him, you could tell he was bursting with ideas and excitement about building companies. After working with Kenneth on Gertrude and later ArtList, he launched a series of apps before founding the mental health journaling platform Jour, selling it to Alan (an Index portfolio company) for $20M.

Max and I kept in touch, and in 2023 he told me he was working on something new. At Alan, he’d been experimenting with how LLMs could enhance therapist-patient interactions, focussing on real, high-stakes conversations where nuance matters. But the deeper he got, the more he saw a broader opportunity. What if AI could handle conversations not only in healthcare, but for the 100 million Americans—contractors, landscapers, realtors, insurance brokers—who run their businesses by phone? He was so energized by the idea that he jumped headfirst back into entrepreneurship.

That idea became Beside, the first cross-platform AI built for the real economy. It starts as a smart receptionist, answering calls and texts, logging details, and responding to customers and leads. Over time, it evolves into a Chief of Staff that remembers context, automates follow-ups, and coordinates schedules. Eventually, it becomes a trusted business partner, surfacing insights and making recommendations to help drive growth. It all lives inside a simple, consumer-grade interface that feels more like WhatsApp or iMessage than enterprise software.

And the vision for Beside goes beyond great UX. With his co-founders Bobby Giangeruso, Aymeric Beaumet, Justin Bureau, and Hélène Blonz (all of whom worked on Jour), Max and his team are reimagining the phone itself, bringing real intelligence, memory, and automation to one of the last major systems in business that hasn’t been meaningfully touched by modern software. Their background in building intuitive mobile apps is obvious when you see the product, and it gives them a unique edge in a massive market ripe for disruption.

For the past 18 months, Beside has operated in stealth as M1, quietly building infrastructure, refining the product, and working with early customers. Available on iOS, Android, macOS, and soon Windows, they’re already supporting more than 20,000 paying customers, with 30% MoM growth over the past six months, and half of users logging into the platform an average of 14 times a day, six days a week. As a landscaper in New Jersey put it: “Not being stressed about forgetting anything a customer wants is invaluable. Beside keeps everything on track and changes the experience of running my business completely.”

AI is moving faster than any wave of tech we’ve seen, both in what apps can do and in the underlying infrastructure itself. In past eras, the stack stabilized quickly: mobile meant iOS and Android, cloud meant AWS and Kubernetes. But with AI, there’s something new every week: new labs, new models, new APIs, new chips. The best founders today live and breathe at the frontier of what’s possible. That’s Max in a nutshell. He’s AI-native, novelty-obsessed, and constantly testing, iterating, and pushing the limits of what technology can do.

I invested personally in Beside’s pre-seed round because I believe so strongly in Max. And I’ve been blown away by how much he’s grown. He still has the same magnetism, beginner’s mindset, and kid-in-a-candy-shop energy that drew me to him all those years ago, but now he’s paired it with a far deeper understanding of what it takes to build an enduring company. What’s changed most is the scale of his ambition. After one great outcome with Jour, he has his sights set on something much bigger: a platform that could change how millions of Americans work, and eventually, how businesses operate around the world.

Index was proud to lead Beside’s seed round, and now we’re thrilled to partner with Max and the team again as they emerge from stealth with $32 million in Series A funding. It’s a massive opportunity, and I’m excited to be beside them for the road ahead.