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Many B2B startups start by targeting SMEs but quickly adapt to the enterprise market where they can charge more.

But with an AI agent called Kit at its core, today’s company says it’s laser focused on helping micro-SMEs survive in harsh business conditions.

And Hike is a little later-stage than most startups we feature. But with its AI-focused pivot having launched in the last 24 hours, it’s almost ‘just like starting over’ - albeit with some serious advantages thanks to what they’ve previously built.

But first:

• Venture Café Global Institute is launching in the UK in partnership with ‘the UK’s answer to DARPA,’ the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA). Venture Cafe exists to bring innovators together across different disciplines in cities across the world.

• Venture Café London will open on 15 May, with two additional UK Venture Cafes planned for later in the year to support regional ecosystems. Find out more about the London launch.

– Martin

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Hike uses AI to replace human SEO consultants for micro-SMEs

There’s pressure on small businesses now more than ever. Rising costs are a big part of this, but even just getting noticed can be more difficult than it once was.

Visibility via search ads is expensive, and paying someone to do a good job of your SEO can be really expensive. Then when Google rejigs its algorithm, you might have to do it all over again from scratch.

The result? Micro-SMEs being priced out of Google, giving them a significant challenge in attracting new business.

Leicestershire-based Hike wants to tackle this by letting AI take the strain.

The company started out by offering software to help micro-SMEs manage their own SEO. But they hit a snag.

“Ultimately, they're very, very busy people, and most of them don't really have time or desire to do it themselves. What they really want is someone to do it for them. But they then have to hire someone, and that's expensive,” says Hike CEO and co-founder Andy Allen.

The solution Hike has created is Kit. Billed as “the AI SEO expert… doing the work an expert would do,” it’s intended to be an AI agent doing an SEO expert’s job at a software subscription price.

How it works

When a business signs up, Kit prompts them to share information about what they do and the products or services they sell.

Once Kit has collected all of this information and analysed the structure and content of the business’ website, it gets to work, figuring out the most effective search keywords the website should be optimised for.

It doesn’t stop there. Kit then gets its metaphorical hands dirty, automatically updating the business’ website itself to make sure the content fits the needs of the SEO strategy it’s developed.

“Kit will go away and do some analysis around the business. It will generate a 12-month content schedule based on industry events that are happening, the keywords, the questions people are asking around the keywords, that sort of thing,” says Allen’s fellow Hike co-founder, Kieran Headley.

“It will look at how they normally write content on the website, and what sort of tone of voice they tend to use. That's then used whenever Kit writes content on the customer's behalf as well. Then it will continue on that schedule around optimising the website, making changes to different pages, writing new content, generating blog posts that they could use… Kit will generate FAQs too, and on the local side, it can optimise their Google Business Profile listing.”

Headley says website changes can be made with the aid of a Javascript snippet businesses add to their website, meaning Kit doesn’t need to store access details to log into the content management system directly. And he’s keen to stress that any major changes to content, such as new blog posts Kit generates, can be edited and approved by the business ahead of publication.

What Kit can do sounds very much like the service human SEO consultant offers. It even puts together automated reports, so users can see the impact of the changes it makes.

The story so far

Allen says he met Headley around 14 years ago, when they were both working as junior SEO consultants at an agency serving SMEs. After a few years in the industry, they teamed up in 2016 to develop some software for SEO professionals, initially called The Web Shed.

While taking part in the Ignite accelerator in Manchester, they realised the other startups in their cohort had a problem. They wanted to use The Web Shed to help them with their SEO as they didn’t have the resources to bring in experts.

“We had a bit of a lightbulb. We were like, why don't we build software for the people that don't know how to do SEO? Because they really need it, and they can't afford experts, and there's no software out there,” Allen says.

Thus the first version of Hike was built, with a focus on walking novices through how to do SEO, something that the SEO software of the time didn’t do.

And they’ve grown that product into a business. Allen says Hike currently has 22 staff, 2,000 customers and around $2 million ARR (USD).

But he says Hike’s growth has been impeded but the fact that many potential customers don’t want to do SEO themselves, even with the help of software to make the process simpler. And thus the idea for Kit was born.

“We've seen the opportunity that they need a service, and we can do it at a price point that enables us to really disrupt the agency market,” Allen says.

2024, and now 2025, have been often hyped as ‘the year of the AI agent’. But true AI agents that can perform complex chains of tasks on a user’s behalf continue to be largely elusive.

Allen argues that because Hike has already built software to do a lot of what Kit needs to do, it’s less of a challenge to ‘agentify’ an existing first-party product than to build entirely new processes from scratch.

Kit launched yesterday, allowing existing Hike customers to upgrade to add Kit to their account, and for new users to sign up to use Kit straight away.

Allen says the US and UK are the main target market for Kit, and he believes the new approach allows them to charge more, as they’ll be competing with SEO consultants, rather than with other SEO software.

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