Daniel Keinrath
12 Aug 2026Anthropic IPO, NVIDIA $300B, AI Watermarks, $TEAM & $NXDR CEO’s Join
Daniel Keinrath: Fonio AI Hits $10M ARR
Fonio AI founder Daniel Keinrath returns to the studio with the news that the Vienna-based voice AI company has hit $10M ARR, growing 25-30% month over month, targeting $25-30M by year-end and $100M next year. He explains how their proprietary turn-detection model reactivated churned customers, the launch of native non-English voices, expansion into WhatsApp, email and a PBX phone system, and SMB adoption as an AI wedge. He also details the high-touch sales motion (hard paywall, up to 80% close rates, 14 demos a day per seller), agency-style co-building of features with paying customers, early US traction, and the sub-12-month payback metric guiding scaling.
12 Jun 2026Lovable $500M ARR, Fable 5, UK AI Minister Joins, OpenAI Price Cuts
Fonio Raises $17M Seed: AI Phone Agents for SMBs
Daniel Keinrath announces Fonio's $17M seed round led by 20VC's Harry Stebbings, which came preemptively without a pitch deck after the company bootstrapped to a $1.5M ARR inflection point. He details roughly 30% month-over-month growth toward $10M ARR this summer and a $30M year-end goal, the AI phone agent product now serving close to 10,000 SMB customers across seven countries, and the roadmap from WhatsApp and email agents to a CRM and full AI employees. He also explains the influencer-heavy, e-commerce-style go-to-market and the sub-48-hour sales cycle.