Smartsupp Turned a Brno Chat Widget Into Europe's Sales Sidekick

The most-used chat window on many European online stores does not come from San Francisco or Tel Aviv. It comes from Brno, the Czech Republic's second city, where in 2013 a couple of classmates from the local university of technology decided the world did not need another clever startup. It needed a live chat that was simple to install, honestly priced, and good enough that a store owner never had to think about it again. They called it Smartsupp, and thirteen years later it is still running quietly in the bottom-right corner of tens of thousands of websites.

That corner is more valuable than it looks. It is the last piece of a store a shopper touches before they buy or leave. Get it right and a hesitant visitor asks one question, gets one answer, and checks out. Get it wrong and they close the tab. Smartsupp built a company on the unglamorous business of getting that moment right, and it did so in a market crowded with better-funded American names.

"We help companies to take communication with customers to the next level."Smartsupp, company mission

01A student who was never anyone's employee

The founder, Petr Janošík, is the kind of entrepreneur who makes career advice sound quaint. By the account of Brno's expat community, he knew what he would do for a living from his first year at the Faculty of Information Technology. Before he finished his degree he already had a project generating millions of Czech koruna a year. He has, reportedly, never been employed by anyone else. Smartsupp was not a pivot from a failed job or a moonlight side hustle. It was the plan.

That single-mindedness shows up in the product. Where competitors kept bolting on features to justify enterprise pricing, Smartsupp held two lines from the start: keep it simple, and keep it fair. Those are easy words to put on a homepage and hard to live with when a big customer asks for a complicated feature and waves a large check. Holding them for a decade is the actual achievement.

02The feature that grew up and moved out

Here is the part of the Smartsupp story that founders should steal. In 2016 the team added a small, free extra to the chat: session recordings, letting a store watch how a visitor clicked around before they messaged. It was meant to make the chat more useful. It quickly attracted around 100,000 users on its own. They named it Smartlook.

By 2019 the side project was showing more commercial upside than the parent. Most companies would have buried it inside the main product and called it a feature. Smartsupp did the harder, smarter thing: in 2020 it let Smartlook spin out as its own company, with roughly $3.6 million in fresh funding, and kept the live chat business focused on what it did best. Knowing when to let a product leave home is a rarer instinct than knowing when to start one.

Your best product is sometimes the feature you almost buried. The trick is noticing before someone else does.

03Winning the region the giants ignored

Ask most people to name a live chat and they will say a big American brand. The category is genuinely crowded - Tidio, Userlike, LiveChat from the Text group, Chaport, Pure Chat, and LiveAgent from fellow Central Europeans Quality Unit, plus sales-heavy platforms like Salesloft further up the funnel. Smartsupp did not out-feature them. It out-localized them.

By speaking the languages and matching the pricing expectations of Central and Eastern Europe, it became the default chat across the Visegrad region - Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary - and spread from there onto English-language e-commerce sites. It is a reminder that distribution beats noise, and that a market the giants find too small or too fiddly can be exactly big enough for a disciplined team.

04Mira, and the un-hyped version of AI

In 2024 Smartsupp shipped its answer to the AI wave: Mira, an AI shopping assistant. The pitch is refreshingly modest. Mira learns a store's catalog, answers customer questions at any hour, and recommends products - and by the company's account it can handle up to 80% of routine inquiries. It is sold as a separately priced add-on, not forced on everyone.

The design choice is the interesting part. Mira is not sold as a replacement for the support team. It takes the boring 80% - where is my order, does this come in blue, what is the return policy - so human agents keep the hard 20% that actually needs a person. That is how you deploy AI in commerce without lighting your customer trust on fire. It sits in the same chat box shoppers already use, so nobody has to learn anything new.

05From startup to part of a group

Smartsupp is now part of ABUGO, a European commerce group that clusters brands like Shopsys, Survio, Reservio and others under one roof. It is a quietly telling move. The new playbook for European software is not always to grow into a lone unicorn; sometimes it is to join a family of commerce tools that share distribution and customers, and to compound from there. For a chat widget whose whole value is being useful to online stores, sitting next to other store-facing products is a natural fit.

06What you can actually do with it

Strip away the story and Smartsupp is a practical tool. Drop the widget on a store - it plugs into Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Wix, Magento and dozens more - and you can chat with visitors in real time, route conversations from email, Messenger and WhatsApp into one inbox, and set up chatbots to catch questions when nobody is at the desk. The session recordings let you replay how a shopper moved before they asked, so support becomes less guesswork. Turn on Mira and the routine load drops.

For a small store, the appeal is that one person can run all of it. For a bigger one, it is that the tool does not demand a six-week rollout. The lesson underneath Smartsupp's whole history is the least fashionable one in software: pick a boring, essential job, do it simply, price it fairly, and keep shipping. Held long enough, that compounds into a business the giants never bothered to stop.

The best growth loop in e-commerce is the one shoppers never notice - a chat box that just earns its keep on conversion.