The Utah company that started by helping tire shops collect Google reviews now sells local businesses an AI Employee that never sleeps, never forgets to follow up, and books the appointment while the owner is under a car.
Eric Rea grew up in the back of his father's tire shop, and if you have ever run a business like that, you already know the sound that haunts it: a phone ringing when nobody can pick it up. A customer with a flat, a quote to give, a job walking out the door because the one person who could answer is elbow-deep in a wheel well. Podium, the company Rea built with Dennis Steele, is essentially a decade-long answer to that ringing phone.
Today Podium is a software company based in Lehi, Utah, valued at $3 billion, used by more than 60,000 local businesses. But it is easier to understand if you forget the valuation for a second and picture the customer: a two-person auto shop, a roofer, a family dental practice, a medspa. Places that live and die on whether they answer fast and follow up. Podium sells them the one thing they can never hire enough of - attention.
Strip away the branding and Podium is a place where all the ways a customer might reach a business land in one thread. A text, a web chat, a Google review, a Facebook message, a missed call - they arrive in a single inbox that the whole shop can see. From that same thread, the business can reply, ask for a review, or collect payment by text. The pitch to a small-business owner is almost boringly practical: stop losing customers in the gaps between your tools.
Then, in 2023, the whole product tilted. Podium put an AI on top of the inbox and called it the AI Employee. Not a chatbot buried in a corner of the website - an employee, with a name, a shift, and a job description. It answers the phone at 2 a.m. It texts back in seconds. It qualifies the lead, answers the usual questions, books the appointment, and pings a human only when a human is actually needed.
Turn more conversations into revenue with a 24/7 AI Employee that manages the full customer journey from first inquiry to booking and beyond.
The insight underneath Podium is almost unfair in how simple it is. When a customer reaches out to a local business, speed decides everything. Reply in a few minutes and you probably win the job. Reply an hour later and they have already called the next name on the list. Nights, weekends, lunch rushes - the exact moments customers reach out are the exact moments nobody is free to answer.
Podium leans on a stat it likes to repeat: text messages get opened about 98% of the time, far above email. That single number is the seed of the whole business. If a customer will almost always read a text, then the game is simply sending the right one, fast, every time - and never missing one. Humans miss. Software does not get tired.
Figures published by Podium; conversion and revenue lift from an OpenAI case study on Podium customers.
Podium did not arrive fully formed. Rea and Steele, both BYU grads, started in 2014 with a tool to help local businesses gather online reviews. They called it RepDrive - a name that sounds like it belongs on a car dealership's back office - and rebranded to Podium in 2015. For a while they worked out of the attic above a Provo bike shop. When they first pitched investors, the story goes, a VC analyst got up and walked out of the room.
The turn came in 2016, when they got into Y Combinator's Winter batch. Podium would later be described as the highest-revenue company ever to come out of YC - not a flashy consumer app, but a review-and-messaging tool for plumbers and dentists. From there the product widened: messaging, then payments in 2020 when the pandemic pushed everything contactless, then the AI layer that now defines it.
Here is the detail that tells you Podium understands its customer. The AI does not come as an abstract "assistant." It comes as a named coworker. For the trades there is Jerry, upgraded in late 2025 to a version the company calls Jerry 2.0. For aesthetic practices there is Avery, the engine inside an AI Operating System built specifically for medspas that ties together patient records, communications, and marketing. A shop owner can tune the AI to sound like their best employee.
Under the hood, the AI Employee splits into specialized roles rather than one do-everything bot: an AI Scheduler, an AI Salesperson, an AI Marketer, an AI Concierge, an AI Reputation Specialist. It runs on OpenAI's models - Podium and OpenAI published a joint case study citing a 30% revenue lift and 45% higher conversion, with AI agents said to be influencing billions in revenue across more than 10,000 business locations. The customers, tellingly, review the bot the way they would a receptionist. Jerry carries a 4.8-star rating across hundreds of Google reviews.
Podium is not alone on this street. Birdeye, Weave, Thryv, Broadly, and a crowd of newer voice-AI startups all sell local businesses some mix of reviews, messaging, and automation. What Podium has that most rivals do not is distribution and timing. It spent years planting itself inside 60,000-plus businesses selling reviews and texting. When AI arrived, it did not need to find customers - it had a base to switch on. AI revenue then grew roughly 300% in a year.
The reframe matters more than it looks. Selling "software" to a busy shop owner means selling them another thing to log into. Selling an "employee" means selling them time back. Same code, very different pitch - and for a customer who is perpetually short-staffed, the second one lands.
Podium runs on the familiar B2B SaaS model - subscriptions tiered by feature, with usage-based add-ons for AI, messaging, phone, and payment volume, plus a cut of payments processed through the platform. The land-and-expand motion is the point: a business signs up for reviews, then adds messaging, then payments, then the AI Employee, and its bill grows with it.
Podium has raised more than $400 million, capped by a $201 million Series D in November 2021 led by YC Continuity that valued it at $3 billion. Backers include Accel, IVP, Summit Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Durable Capital Partners. Estimated ARR sits near $220 million for 2024.
Where it fits in the market is clear: Podium is a vertical bet on the un-glamorous economy. Not enterprise, not consumer, but the auto shops, roofers, dentists, and medspas that make up most of Main Street. It is the same wager the OpenAI case study quietly makes - that the biggest, most immediate money in AI is not in writing poetry or code, but in answering the phone for a business that cannot afford to miss the call.
Everything local businesses need to win.
There is a neat symmetry to it. The kid from the tire shop built the tool the tire shop always needed. Podium's whole thesis is that a two-person business should be able to respond like a large one - and that, more and more, the thing doing the responding will not be a person at all.