fonio

fonio is an AI communication platform for small and medium-sized businesses, founded in 2024 and headquartered in Vienna. Its flagship product, an AI Phone Assistant, answers every call around the clock, books appointments automatically, qualifies leads and handles routine questions, and now automates more than 2 million calls a month for over 9,500 customers across nine markets. The engineering stack spans conversational AI, AI voice and telephony, speech recognition, natural language processing, and automation of scheduling, lead qualification and CRM workflows.

The company is roughly 50 people and describes itself as a team of builders. Many are former founders, including a CEO who exited an ad-tech startup in 2024; others have scaled products at companies such as Canva. The CTO began building software at the age of 14. Stated operating principles are few meetings, direct feedback, fast shipping and lived ownership.

Beyond the phone assistant, fonio is developing what it calls the first fully automated CRM system in the world. The company frames this as an early-stage ambition - "we're just getting started" - making it, in its own telling, a work-in-progress at meaningful scale rather than a finished product.