How Smartsupp Turned a Free Chat Box Into an AI Sales Assistant

There is a small bubble in the bottom-right corner of thousands of online stores. Most people scroll past it. A few click it when a size chart is unclear or a delivery date is missing. That bubble is one of the quietest pieces of software on the internet, and for a company in Brno, Czech Republic, it turned into a business that now runs on roughly 100,000 webshops and websites.

Smartsupp started in 2013 with a plain idea: build a live chat that anyone could switch on in minutes, keep it simple, and price it fairly. Three graduates of Brno University of Technology - Petr Janosik, Dusan Kmet and Vladimir Sandera - put it together without a large funding round behind them. The free plan did most of the marketing. If a shop owner could add a chat widget in the time it took to make coffee, they usually kept it.

Twelve years later the product looks different. The live chat is still there, but a chatbot sits behind it, and in front of both is Mira, an AI shopping assistant that Smartsupp says can answer up to 80% of the questions customers ask. The company describes it as a 24/7 helper that learns a store's catalogue, recommends products, and closes the gap between a browsing visitor and a paying one.

The unfashionable way to build software

Plenty of startups from this era share the same origin slide: raise early, hire fast, chase growth, worry about profit later. Smartsupp took the other road. It was profitable by 2014, its second year, and grew mostly on its own cash. By 2015 the company was reporting around 180,000 EUR in annual revenue with roughly 6,300 active users, about 1,470 of them paying - a figure that represented something close to 600% year-over-year growth.

Only after that did it take outside money. In 2016 Smartsupp accepted about 10 million koruna from Reflex Capital, Webnode and Spread Capital, giving up roughly 15% of the company. That is a small round by the standards of the time, and a small slice to sell. Raising from a position of profit rather than desperation changes the terms, and it kept the founders in control of their own roadmap.

The discipline shows up in the product. Smartsupp never became the sprawling, everything-suite that many of its rivals grew into. It stayed a messaging tool that a small ecommerce team could understand on day one. Simplicity is easy to write on a slide and hard to defend quarter after quarter, because every enterprise deal tempts you to add one more setting. Holding the line is a decision, not an accident.

From answering questions to closing sales

The more interesting shift is what Smartsupp decided the chat window was for. Live chat began life as a support cost - a way to deal with complaints and stuck orders. Smartsupp reframed it as a sales channel. The pitch to online stores is not "reduce your support tickets." It is "talk to the shopper at the exact second they hesitate, and you sell more." Same window, different job.

That reframing is what makes the AI layer matter. A human team can only staff so many hours, and most abandoned carts happen after everyone has gone home. Mira is pitched at that gap: instant answers at 2am, product recommendations while the shopper is still deciding, and a handoff to a person when the question actually needs one. The company has been clear that the goal is not to remove humans from the loop but to let them spend their time on the conversations that are worth a human.

The economics are simple enough to explain in one line: answering a question a hesitating shopper has, at the moment they have it, is usually cheaper than the ad that brought them to the page. Most ecommerce founders pour attention into the top of the funnel and leave the bottom to a static FAQ. Smartsupp's whole thesis is that the last few metres before checkout are where a conversation pays for itself.

A European SaaS story that stayed European

Smartsupp never moved its centre of gravity to San Francisco. It grew a strong base across Central and Eastern Europe and the DACH region - Germany, Austria and Switzerland - and became one of the more widely used customer-messaging tools on the continent, often cited among the top five in Europe. It now sits inside ABUGO, a Czech SaaS group that also holds names like Shopsys, Survio and Reservio, with Sandera involved on the group side as well.

That regional footprint is easy to underrate from the outside. Central and Eastern Europe keeps producing quietly excellent software companies that rarely make the headlines written elsewhere, in part because they do not follow the raise-and-burn script that generates most of the coverage. Smartsupp is a clean example: durable, profitable, and largely unknown to people who do not run an online store in the region.

What you can actually do with it

For a shop owner, the practical value is straightforward. Drop the widget on the site and you get a live chat that connects to email, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, so conversations land in one place instead of five inboxes. Add the chatbot and automation, and routine questions - order status, opening hours, return policy - get answered without anyone lifting a finger. Turn on Mira and the store gets a recommendation engine and a first-line responder that works through the night.

There is also an AI reply assistant for the humans who are still in the loop, drafting responses they can edit rather than type from scratch, plus reporting, lead capture, a mobile SDK and a catalogue of integrations. None of it is exotic. The point was never to impress with a demo. It was to help a small team on a busy store answer more people, faster, and turn a few more of them into buyers.

If there is a lesson worth stealing here, it is not the AI. It is the sequencing. Smartsupp earned distribution first with a genuinely free product, stayed alive without depending on the next round, and only then layered on the expensive, model-driven features once it had the customers to justify them. The order matters. A lot of companies bolt AI onto a product nobody adopted; Smartsupp added it to one that a hundred thousand stores already ran.