Press Kit – Buggy Smart

1

The problem

250,000 babies are born in London every year. Nobody tells you which cafes their buggy can get into.

Google Maps doesn’t ask. TripAdvisor doesn’t ask. The only way to know is to call ahead, show up and hope, or rely on word of mouth from other parents. Mike Litman got tired of arriving somewhere with his son’s buggy and being turned away at the door.

2

The idea

What if an AI just... called them all?

Inspired by the Guinndex – which called 3,000+ Irish pubs to track Guinness prices – Litman built Poppy: a voice AI that calls London venues and asks one question. Are you baby and pram friendly? She sounds natural. Most people have no idea.

3

The scale

10,000+ calls. 1,140 venues rated. Every pin on the map represents roughly 10 calls.

Poppy calls venues via Twilio, using ElevenLabs conversational AI. Every call is transcribed. Claude classifies the response. The result goes on a live map at buggysmart.app. No human initiates a call. No human reviews the transcript. It runs every day. Twilio’s answering machine detection identifies voicemail within 5-7 seconds – Poppy hangs up immediately rather than leaving a message. The 90% that don’t make it onto the map – voicemail, IVR, no answer, unclear – aren’t failures. They’re the filter. That’s what makes the 10% reliable. Anyone can put venues on a map. Buggy Smart only shows you what a human actually said. At London Living Wage, the equivalent manual research would cost over £5,000 and take two months. Poppy did it in weeks, autonomously.

Most data is frozen the moment it’s collected. This data isn’t. The classifier automatically re-evaluates past calls as it improves – so ratings get more accurate over time, even for calls made months ago. On the night of 20 April 2026, 184 venues were added to the map without a single new call being made. The pipeline ran at 9pm, worked through its backlog of previously-unclear transcripts, resolved them, and deployed by morning. No human was involved at any point.

4

The findings

Hackney leads at 62% from 112 calls. GAIL’s said yes in 24 of 31 branches. One café said “No, I hate them.”

92% of London venues can accommodate a buggy in some way. Hackney leads outright yes at 62% from 112 verified calls. GAIL’s Bakery is the most consistently accessible chain – 24 of 31 branches confirmed yes.

5

What’s coming

76 supermarket branches queued. The chain comparison no one has done.

Waitrose vs Iceland vs Sainsbury’s vs Aldi vs Lidl – which supermarket chain is most consistently accessible to parents with buggies? Buggy Smart is calling every major supermarket branch in London to find out. The data will be published here when complete.