Harry Stebbings doesn’t like to hang about.
He’s the founder of London-based investor 20VC and the host of the Twenty Minute VC (20VC) podcast, so named because his interviews with tech founders and venture capitalists last roughly 20 minutes.
20VC currently has more than $650m in AUM, and his investments include Perplexity, 11x, Linear, AgentSync, Poolside, Linktree, Nex Health, Merge API and many more.
Stebbings knows what he’s talking about, and he isn’t holding back in his predictions about the future of fonio.ai, which has surpassed $10m in ARR, putting it among the fastest-growing AI start-ups in Europe.
The milestone follows the company’s $17m seed round, led by 20VC at a $140m valuation, which closed in June 2026.
Stebbings was in chipper mood when he took to LinkedIn yesterday.
“I get in a lot of trouble for saying that triple, triple, double, double, is not enough for the next wave of venture,” he said.
“About six months ago, (general partner at 20VC) Paul Bonnet and me went to Vienna to do everything in our power to give Fonio $15m.
“Since then, they have gone from $1m to $10m ARR. They will hit $100m in a further 18 months.
“They have scaled to thousands of customers with only 60 team members. Incredibly fast revenue scaling, very high revenue quality.
“The perfect combination of sales-led CEO Daniel Keinrath and a world-class CTO Matthias Gruber.
“Fonio will be one of the breakout companies of Europe. Watch this space.”
Founded in Vienna in 2024 by Daniel Keinrath and Matthias Gruber, the company helps businesses with high volumes of customer contact deploy personalised AI agents that are available 24/7 and conduct natural-sounding conversations over the phone.
Since the start of the year, fonio.ai has grown by an average of more than 30 per cent month over month and is targeting ARR of €20-30m by the end of 2026.
The company works closely with customers to identify pain points and turn them into new product features, allowing the platform to evolve continuously in short development cycles.
Recent developments include a new generation of self-produced AI voices designed to deliver increasingly natural and human-like conversations across multiple languages; AI agents that learn from the conversations they have; and automatic recognition of returning callers, allowing the AI to use existing customer context during subsequent interactions.
The company made its first hire in June 2025. Just 14 months later, it has grown to 81 employees, including 17 people who joined in the past month alone.
Hiring
The company is continuing to scale, with 52 positions currently open and plans to grow the team to between 130 and 150 employees by the end of the year.
The roles include a head of growth, which comes with a €250k salary and equity.
The team now spans 10 markets, with Austria remaining the company’s largest hub, followed by Germany, Italy and Poland. fonio.ai is also growing its presence in France, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil and the US.
Keinrath said: “I am incredibly proud of this team. What these people have built in 12 months is something very few manage to do, and they do it with an energy that blows me away every single day.
“For me, that is the best proof that with the right mindset, the right people and the courage to challenge the status quo, you can build something truly big out of Austria too.”