---
title: 'Ex Commercial Founder at fonio'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ex-commercial-founder-fonio-vienna-t3mz4b78vqrw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Ex Commercial Founder at fonio

- **Company:** fonio
- **Location:** Vienna, Austria
- **Compensation:** €100k–€150k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fonio/1989696d-aab7-4b40-955d-05a2bb982af6

## Job description

## About fonio

We grew from $1M to $10M ARR in under 12 months and now serve 10,000+ customers. Fonio is Europe’s market leader for AI phone agents for SMBs. Now we’re expanding globally and into new products. We move fast, take ownership, give direct feedback, and avoid politics and unnecessary meetings. Join one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies.

## Your Role

As Ex Commercial Founder at fonio, you own one of our products. You're not just shaping the roadmap; you're accountable for the commercial success of the product. Strategy, positioning, go-to-market, and growth all sit with you. You'll operate like a mini-CEO for your product: making the calls, running the experiments, and carrying the numbers. You won't do it alone: you're paired with a technical counterpart and together you own the product.

## What you'll do

- Own a product - from strategy and roadmap to go-to-market and revenue
- Define positioning, pricing, and the commercial strategy for your product
- Work directly with engineering, design, sales, and marketing to ship and grow fast
- Own the metrics that matter - adoption, retention, and revenue - and be accountable for them
- Run discovery: talk to customers, validate problems, and decide what gets built

## What We Offer

- Up to €150.000 OTE + equity.
- On-site in Vienna, Munich, Barcelona or London - relocation package to Vienna if needed.
- Real ownership of a fonio product: you get to essentially work like an entrepreneur inside of fonio.
- Maximum autonomy - you run your product like your own company.
- Everything you need to be successful - if you need it - you´ll get it.

## What You Bring

- Demonstrated track record as a founder or commercial owner - you've built and launched a B2B SaaS product & owned it end to end from the commercial side.
- Strong commercial instinct: you think in terms of markets, customers, and revenue
- Comfortable operating with high ambiguity and no predefined structure
- Sharp analytical thinking paired with a bias for execution
- Excellent communication in English; German is a strong plus given our DACH focus
- Bonus: experience with AI products, B2B SaaS, or voice technology

## About fonio

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: fonio is a European AI platform that provides AI phone assistants and omnichannel customer communication solutions for small and medium-sized businesses.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Vienna, Austria
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Daniel Keinrath (CEO) and Matthias Gruber (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered customer communication / Telecommunications
- **Target customers**: B2B, primarily small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with high volumes of customer calls
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To ensure no lead, customer, or opportunity is missed by providing 24/7 AI-powered communication across phone, WhatsApp, email, and chat.

## Products & Services
- **AI Phone Assistant**: An AI agent that handles inbound and outbound calls, capable of scheduling appointments, answering inquiries, processing orders, and transcribing conversations. It features speech recognition for difficult dialects, turn-detection for natural conversation flow, and real-time emotion recognition. It can be set up in under 10 minutes with no coding required.
- **Omnichannel Platform**: Expanding beyond voice to include WhatsApp (already live), with email and chatbot support to follow. The platform integrates with CRMs, calendar tools, and databases via native integrations and APIs.
- **Proprietary Calendar**: An AI-native calendar tool that is already live as part of the platform.
- **Proprietary CRM**: A CRM purpose-built for AI-driven customer interactions, expected to launch by the end of Q3 2026.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $140 million valuation (as of June 2026, per seed round)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of over $20 million, including a $17 million seed round led by 20VC (June 2026) and a €3 million angel round (December 2025).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: 20VC (lead), with participation from founders and executives of Synthesia, HubSpot, and Revolut. Previous angel investors include early backers of Facebook and Airbnb.
- **Growth Signals**: 
    - Over 7,000 customers across nine markets (Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Poland, Brazil, UK, USA)
    - Automates over 2 million calls per month
    - Growing at roughly 40% month-over-month
    - Acquired competitor fluently in September 2025
    - Added $1 million in ARR in April 2026 alone, targeting a 5x increase by year-end
    - Opening offices in New York, Munich, Milan, Paris, London, Warsaw, and Barcelona

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary European Infrastructure**: Develops its own orchestration layer and models (speech recognition, turn-detection, emotion recognition), ensuring all data remains in the EU on servers in Nuremberg, Germany. This differentiates them from competitors who white-label US services.
- **High End-to-End Resolution Rate**: In roughly 90% of cases, the AI agent conducts a fully human-like conversation and resolves the inquiry without needing to route it to a human.
- **Builder-Heavy Team**: Over half the team are former founders, operations leaders, or people who have scaled products at companies like Canva.

## Strategic Focus
- **Omnichannel Expansion**: Moving beyond voice to become a full omnichannel platform (WhatsApp, email, chat).
- **International Expansion**: Establishing physical offices in key markets (New York, Munich, Milan, Paris, London, Warsaw, Barcelona) after recent launches in the UK and US.
- **Building an AI-Native Tool Ecosystem**: Developing a proprietary calendar and CRM to create a complete, integrated platform for customer communication.

## Why Work Here
- **Rapid Growth & Impact**: The company is in a phase of hypergrowth (40% MoM), and employees are "still early enough that your work will genuinely shape the culture, the product, and the company." [fonio.ai/en/careers](https://www.fonio.ai/en/careers)
- **Culture**: Described as fast, committed, and in-office by default. The team emphasizes moving fast and having fun. Most roles are Vienna-based, with the expectation of being in the office most days.
- **Remote Options**: Engineering roles are fully remote (within ±3 hours of CET). For other roles, there is a temporary relocation to Vienna for onboarding (1-3 months), followed by relocation to the target market.
- **Relocation Support**: The company sponsors travel and accommodation in Vienna for the onboarding period and offers full relocation support for moving to target markets.
- **Team Size**: Around 40-50 people, with plans to double by the end of the year.
- **Hiring Process**: A 3-4 step process: 15-minute intro call, 30-45 minute skills interview (sometimes with a case study), potentially a deeper skills or leadership interview, and a final 20-minute culture call with both founders. [fonio.ai/en/careers](https://www.fonio.ai/en/careers)

## Sources
1. [fonio.ai - Product Page](https://www.fonio.ai/en)
2. [fonio.ai - Careers Page](https://www.fonio.ai/en/careers)
3. [fonio.ai - Press Section](https://www.fonio.ai/en/press)
4. [fonio.ai - Seed Funding Press Release](https://www.fonio.ai/en/news-cool-stuff/pr-14mio-seed-funding-20vc)
5. [LinkedIn - fonio.ai](https://at.linkedin.com/company/fonio-ai)

## Other roles at fonio

- [Social Media Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-manager-fonio-vienna-vd3p93hhvnwj) — Vienna, Austria
- [Growth Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-engineer-fonio-remote-8xeajdkg6n6r)
- [Marketing Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-engineer-fonio-vienna-eqy8jk8et4f8) — Vienna, Austria
- [Performance Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/performance-marketer-fonio-vienna-d1ney0xvz97a) — Vienna, Austria
- [Mid-Market Account Executive (Brazil)](https://feeny.ai/job/mid-market-account-executive-brazil-fonio-campinas-gd50q16287dh) — Campinas, Brazil
- [Social Media Creator (Brazil)](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-creator-brazil-fonio-campinas-2j6xk1wvkeqj) — Campinas, Brazil
- [Sales Development Representative (US)](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-us-fonio-new-york-30bef24m6djx) — New York, NY
- [Forward Deployed Engineer (Polish)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-polish-fonio-warsaw-wrrkmre8zjen) — Warsaw, Poland
- [Partner Manager (Polish)](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-manager-polish-fonio-warsaw-ywysek0a4qjw) — Warsaw, Poland
- [Revenue Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/revenue-operations-lead-fonio-vienna-z70ss5yb4mg6) — Vienna, Austria