Podium

Podium, based in Lehi, Utah, is an AI native communications and lead conversion platform that helps local businesses turn every call, text, and web chat into revenue. Founded in 2014 by chief executive Eric Rea and co founder Dennis Steele, who grew up around his father's tire shop, it went through Y Combinator and has raised more than four hundred million dollars from investors including Accel, IVP, and GV, growing to more than eleven hundred employees and over one hundred thousand local businesses. Its wager is that the same speed and follow through that make a great human employee are what most local businesses lack, since most leads arrive when no one is available and go cold before anyone replies.

The centerpiece is an AI Employee named Jerry, now in a second generation built on a leading frontier model, that works around the clock to capture leads, qualify them, handle objections, book appointments, take payments, request reviews, and follow up, all in the business's own voice and across text, phone, and web chat. Jerry ships with vertical baselines tuned for auto dealerships, home services, aesthetics, and retail, then adapts to a specific business's inventory, policies, and playbooks, which owners can coach in plain English rather than configuration screens, seeing changes apply across channels in real time. It connects to inventory and systems of record through more than two hundred integrations, routes calls by intent, scores leads, escalates to humans when judgment is needed, and, in its latest release, shows its thought process so owners can see which policies, data, and validation checks it ran. All of this sits on top of Podium's wider platform of a unified inbox, reviews, payments, and bulk messaging.

Podium is built for local, brick and mortar operators who lack engineers on staff, and it emphasizes transparency and control alongside outcomes like faster response, higher show rates, and more conversions. It runs as a cloud platform, powers Jerry with a chosen frontier model rather than letting customers pick their own, and works through channels and integrations rather than driving a browser. For an auto, home services, aesthetics, or retail business that wants an always on employee to convert demand and never miss a lead, Podium is a strong and proven fit; a company wanting a standalone chatbot without the surrounding platform, or a self hosted, model flexible agent stack, will find it an integrated suite built for local business.