With roughly 10,000 customers already on board, fonio.ai has established itself as Europe’s category leader in AI phone agents for SMBs, letting businesses spin up a phone agent in minutes and handle everything from support calls to appointment booking. The company, based in Austria, is now growing its offering beyond voice communication and branching into email, WhatsApp, and chatbots, enabling companies to use a single platform for all their communication needs. Currently, fonio.ai is expanding into Western and Eastern Europe and the Americas, with new offices opening in Paris, London, New York, Barcelona, and more.
To fund that expansion, founder Daniel Keinrath closed a $3.9 million angel round followed by a $17 million seed round led by 20VC. For both rounds, fonio.ai used Roundtable to pool smaller angel investors into SPVs, aiming to have one clean entry on the cap table, an experience Daniel describes as fast, clean, and effortless from start to finish.
In this interview, he shares the details about fonio.ai’s mission, its funding rounds, and his experience working with Roundtable, along with his advice for founders who are gearing up to raise for the first time.
Key takeaways:
- Founded in Austria, fonio.ai has grown into Europe’s leading AI phone agent for SMBs, with about 10,000 customers building phone agents in minutes.
- Growth has been backed by a $3.9M angel round and a $17M seed round led by 20VC at a $140M valuation, together totaling over $20M raised.
- For each funding round, Roundtable pooled fonio.ai’s angels and smaller investors into a single SPV, a structure that enabled him to keep the cap table clean.
- For Daniel Keinrath, the Roundtable experience was defined by speed, simplicity, and the team’s responsiveness. From start to finish, everything was straightforward and effortless, and the platform felt intuitive and easy to navigate, making Roundtable the obvious choice for a future round.
Roundtable: Could you present fonio.ai to our readers? What problem are you solving? What’s the mission?
Daniel Keinrath: We’re the market leader in Europe for AI phone agents for SMBs, with roughly 10,000 customers today. With Fonio, you can build an AI phone agent in under two minutes, without any technical setup. It picks up calls, handles support requests, books appointments, and can hand off to a human whenever needed. We built our own orchestration layer rather than white-labeling US services, which means all the data stays with us: our servers are in Germany, and we’re GDPR and EU AI Act compliant by design, with the company itself based in Austria.
We’re also expanding into other communication layers: email, WhatsApp, chatbots, phone systems, and more. Our mission is for Fonio to become the one place SMBs go to handle any communication with the outside world, instead of stitching together five different tools.
Roundtable: Could you tell me more about fonio.ai’s funding rounds, and the role of Roundtable in them?
Daniel Keinrath: We did one angel round and one seed round. The angel round closed in December 2025 at $3.9 million from a group of investors that includes early backers of Facebook and Airbnb. We pooled all the smaller angels below a certain threshold into a Roundtable SPV, to keep everything as lean as possible. Under Austrian law, it’s important to keep the cap table lean if you want to stay agile.
The same logic applied to the seed round. The round was led by 20VC, with participation from existing investors and from founders and executives at Synthesia, HubSpot, and Revolut, bringing our total funding to over $20 million, and our valuation at $140 million. Again, we wanted to bring in a few angels alongside the lead, so we pooled them into a Roundtable SPV, rather than adding them individually to the cap table.
Roundtable: What was your experience with Roundtable like, both with the platform and the team?
Daniel Keinrath: My experience was really positive: the team was always very responsive and helpful whenever I had questions, and the platform itself is clean and intuitive, which makes for a very easy setup. I’m very happy with all of it.
Roundtable: What features were the most beneficial to you? Did anything surprise you?
Daniel Keinrath: Honestly, nothing felt “special”, and I mean this in a good way: everything was very straightforward and easy. You just go on Roundtable, build your SPV within a few minutes, and you’re ready to go. The only part that took a bit longer is ensuring everyone did their KYC, but that’s normal.
Roundtable: What advice would you give to other founders raising funds for the first time?
Daniel Keinrath: I’d advise founders to set a deadline. You need to create urgency. Give yourself a timeframe, let’s say, three weeks. In the first week, before the official start, quietly talk to investors who are friends of yours to get early commitments. Not everyone will have that option, but the more important thing is to nudge investors through your network so they come to you, rather than you doing cold outreach to them. In the second week, once things officially start, the best thing you can do is get someone else to make the connection, so the investor reaches out to you.
Roundtable: If you had to sum up the value of Roundtable to another founder in one sentence, what would it be?
Daniel Keinrath: Roundtable helps you keep your cap table lean in Europe.
Roundtable: For a future fundraise, would Roundtable be among your options?
Daniel Keinrath: Yes, absolutely. Everything was very smooth and easy.
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