‍Q: For readers hearing about HIO for the first time, can you introduce the company?

GA: HIO is the AI business partner for SMBs. We handle every customer interaction, every DM, every comment, every email, in the business owner’s voice, and we surface the growth opportunities hidden inside those conversations. The owner stays in control, his customers always hear back, and nothing falls through the cracks. 

Instead of him wearing multiple hats, doing support, social, and sales, we elevate him. We learn from him, from every channel his business touches, and handle the work in a smarter, more efficient way. We help preserve the intimate relationship he or she has with his customers while unlocking growth they do not have the time to find on their own.

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Q: What problem are you solving day-to-day for an SMB owner?

GA: Customer communication never stops. Messages arrive all day across every channel, and the cost of a slow reply, no reply, or a missed opportunity is real. It is a bad review, a lost sale, a customer who never comes back. An SMB owner cannot afford a social media manager or a customer support team. HIO solves both sides of that problem. No message goes unanswered, the owner stays in control through a human-in-the-loop approval flow, and we surface signals he would never have had time to think about. For a solopreneur, we add three employees for almost nothing. For a business that already has a small support team, we can either replace part of that cost or amplify what they can do.

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Q: Why is this solution different from what already exists?

GA: For SMBs, no solution gets smarter as it works with you. We come in as your intern, learn from you, then earn the right to become your full business partner. Most other tools are scripted, with rules created in advance, canned replies. We are dynamic. Every conversation, every edit you make to one of our suggestions, makes us better at acting as an extension of you. 

Enterprises already have the budgets, the teams, and the technologies to deliver this kind of experience. SMBs want the same thing but cannot afford it. We are packaging enterprise-grade customer intelligence for the largest business segment in the country, and we are doing it in a mobile-friendly product that is always available.

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“If we get this right, we are giving millions of SMBs access to the kind of customer intelligence that today only large enterprises can afford.”

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Q: You are working with early design partners for product testing right now. What have you learned, and how is the product evolving?

GA: We handpicked our design partners deliberately, integrated the product into their businesses, and started measuring everything. There is already live data we can learn from, and our brain, the AI engine behind HIO, gets more capable with every interaction. 

Some partners have come back to us within a week and said, “Guys, you’re hired.” Others have told us, “I could not have done it better.” What is most striking is the moment owners realize they were leaving revenue on the table. One said, “Now I truly understand what I did not understand before you surfaced your insights to me.” Those moments are why we exist, and they validate our thesis every single day.

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Q: Competition in vertical AI is intense. How are you thinking about building a moat?

GA: We think about competition constantly. New tools launch almost daily. Our edge is that most of them are generic. They do not understand the specific business, the owner’s tone, or his individual customers. We hold a deliberate balance between AI and human-in-the-loop, where the owner is the human in the loop. That preserves the intimacy an SMB’s relationship with its customers depends on, while still giving him enterprise-level intelligence. 

In a noisy market, we believe that combination, deep business context plus a learning engine that compounds over time, is what creates a durable advantage.

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Q: You spent many years at Wix. What from that experience are you carrying into HIO?

GA: At Wix I saw what SMBs struggle with at massive scale. It is not the product or the pricing. It is the operational overwhelm of running everything yourself. 

HIO is the company I wanted to exist for SMBs when I was still at Wix. I felt then that a solution like this would wrap around everything they were already doing, the inventory, the catalog, the storefront, and unlock the part they cannot get to, which is the customer signals and the growth opportunities sitting inside their conversations.

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Q: What is coming next for HIO?

GA: We just launched our new website with a waitlist for SMBs, and that is step one of a three-step launch cycle. The metaphor I have been using with the team is that the spaceship has lifted off. In a few weeks we will open the product to a broader audience, and shortly after that we will run a much bigger marketing push across the channels SMBs live in. The product has moved from a basic CX tool that leverages agentic AI capabilities into a full business partnership suite in roughly three months, faster than I thought possible.

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Q: What kind of investor partnership matters most at this stage?

GA: Helping access distribution. We are building for SMBs, and SMBs are notoriously hard to reach directly. We are a product-led growth company, so the most valuable thing an investor can do for us is open doors, to platforms, marketplaces, and ecosystems that already have trust with SMBs, and to the right early customers. That is where partnership creates the most impact for a company at our stage.

If the early signals from design partners hold, HIO will bring enterprise-grade customer intelligence to a segment that has never had access to it.