The Brno company behind the two-eyed chat widget bootstrapped its way to 100,000 customers - now it is betting that an AI named Mira can sell shoes better than a call center.
The first thing you notice is the eyes. Two of them, blue, cartoonish, peering out from a chat bubble in the corner of a shopping site. It is a strange face to put on serious software. But that face has watched over hundreds of millions of online conversations, and behind it sits one of the least-hyped success stories in European software: Smartsupp, a company from Brno, Czech Republic, that built live chat for online stores and never really stopped.
Smartsupp does one thing, and it does it for people who sell things on the internet. When a visitor lands on a webshop and hesitates - which size, does it ship to Portugal, is this actually leather - a Smartsupp widget opens the conversation. Sometimes a human answers. Increasingly, a bot answers first, or an AI does, and the human only steps in when there is a sale worth closing. The pitch on the company's homepage is blunt: turn every chat into revenue.
That is a narrower ambition than most support-software companies admit to, and it is the point. Smartsupp is not trying to be a helpdesk, a CRM and a marketing cloud in one login. It is trying to be the box in the corner that answers the question standing between a browser and a checkout.
The customer list runs in two directions at once. On one end are tens of thousands of small webshops - the size of business that cannot afford a support department and needs the chat to do the selling. On the other end are names that show up in television ad breaks: Audi, Volkswagen, Citroen, Generali, UniCredit Bank, AXA Assistance, Office Shoes, the sports retailer Insportline. The used-car marketplace AAA Auto has said it pulls around 240 new leads a day through the widget.
It is an unusual spread. Most software eventually picks a lane - go up-market to the enterprise or stay down-market and cheap. Smartsupp kept both, and the reason is that the enterprise brands and the corner shop want the same thing from a chat box: answer the customer fast, and do not make it complicated.
Chat users, the company says, spend about 30% more per order. One in five conversations ends in a purchase. That is the entire business, expressed as two numbers.
E-commerce has a gap that traffic alone never closes. A shopper arrives ready-ish to buy, hits one unanswered question, and leaves. No support ticket, no email, no trace - just an abandoned cart and a bounce. For a small store, that unanswered question is the difference between a good month and a flat one. Smartsupp built its whole product around catching that moment before it turns into a lost sale.
The classic answer was live chat: put a human on the other end. The trouble is that humans sleep, take lunch and cost money, and most webshops cannot staff a chat window at 11pm on a Sunday, which is exactly when people shop. So the product grew. First chatbots to cover the off-hours and the repetitive questions. Then, in 2024, an AI assistant meant to do more than deflect tickets - one built to sell.
Mira is Smartsupp's AI shopping assistant, and it is the clearest signal of where the company is heading. It reads a store's catalog, recommends products, answers technical questions, and does it in a voice the brand can tune so it does not sound like a generic robot. When a shopper is warm - close to buying, or asking the kind of question a person should handle - Mira hands the conversation to a human operator. Alongside it, an AI Reply Assistant drafts agent responses and, the company says, cuts average response time by roughly half.
A chatbot greets the visitor, answers FAQs and captures the lead - even at 3am.
The AI reads the catalog, suggests products and replies in the brand's own voice.
When a shopper is ready to buy, the conversation passes to a live agent.
The design philosophy is worth noticing because it runs against the loudest version of the AI-support story. Smartsupp is not selling a wall of automation that keeps customers away from staff. It is selling a handoff - let the machine handle volume and the boring questions, then deliver the ready-to-buy customer to a person. The interesting engineering problem is not the answering. It is knowing when to stop answering and call a human.
Underneath the friendly widget is a fairly complete toolkit. Live chat is the base layer, with visitor recordings so operators can see what a shopper looked at before they typed, a mobile SDK for stores that sell through an app, and an inbox that pulls email, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp into one place instead of scattering them across tabs. On top sit the chatbots, which run the flows that qualify leads and cover the hours no one is at a desk. Then the AI layer - Mira for selling, the Reply Assistant for speeding up agents - and a lead-generation module that captures details around the clock and exports them straight to a CRM.
The practical value is mundane in the best way. A store owner installs a snippet, connects the platform - Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Shoptet, one of more than forty integrations - and starts answering customers who would otherwise have left without a word. A reporting dashboard tells them which conversations turned into orders. There is no data-science project to run and no six-week onboarding. That low friction is a large part of why the tool spread through tens of thousands of small shops by word of mouth as much as by sales calls.
Smartsupp runs on the freemium SaaS model everyone knows: a free tier with a limited number of conversations, then paid monthly plans that step up by agent seats and features, with the AI tools sitting in the higher plans. Nothing exotic. What is unusual is the balance sheet behind it. The company has been profitable since 2014 - its first full year - and grew for most of a decade without leaning on big venture rounds. A growth investment from Reflex Capital came later; the disclosed funding is measured in low single-digit millions, not the hundreds of millions its larger rivals have raised.
Profitability is not just a virtue-signal here. It shapes the product. A company that has to justify a burn rate tends to bolt on features to chase bigger contracts. A company that pays its own bills can stay narrow - keep building the chat box for the webshop instead of drifting up into enterprise suites it does not want to become.
The customer-chat market is loud and full: Intercom, Zendesk, Tidio, Crisp, LiveChat, Tawk.to, Olark, Gorgias, Freshchat. Most of them either aim at software companies and their support inboxes, or at enterprises with budgets to match. Smartsupp planted itself in a different spot: e-commerce first, conversion first, priced for the store that measures success in orders rather than tickets closed.
That focus is the differentiator. Intercom is a Swiss Army knife for SaaS support. Zendesk is a ticketing empire. Smartsupp is the tool you install because you sell products and want the person on your site to buy one. It shows up near the top of review sites - 700-plus reviews averaging five stars on Capterra and G2 - not because it does the most, but because it does the specific thing e-commerce operators care about.
Smartsupp was founded in 2013 by Vladimir Sandera and Petr Janosik, and it stayed put. Not San Francisco, not London - Brno, the Czech Republic's second city and a growing base for bootstrapped software firms. The location is part of the story. Lower costs and steady engineering talent make the profitable-and-independent path easier to walk than it would be on a Bay Area burn rate. The company built a workforce of somewhere between roughly 45 and 100 people, ran a "People of Smartsupp" employer brand, and kept the culture product-led rather than growth-at-all-costs.
There is a lightness to the brand that the seriousness of the business does not quite explain. The logo is a pair of googly eyes. The copy is plain. For a company whose software handles hundreds of millions of visitor conversations a month, Smartsupp has always been comfortable not taking itself too seriously - which, in enterprise software, is its own kind of signal.
The future of retail is a conversation. Smartsupp made that bet in 2013, before it was a slide in every deck, and spent ten years making the conversation convert.
The open question is the same one facing every company in the category: what happens when the AI gets good enough to close the sale itself, with no human at the end. Smartsupp's answer, for now, is the handoff - keep a person in the loop where it counts and let Mira do the rest. Whether that stays the right shape as the models improve is the next chapter. For a company that turned a chat box with googly eyes into a top-5 European platform, it is not the hardest problem it has solved.