Harry Stebbings, founder of London-based investor 20VC and host of the Twenty Minute VC podcast, has predicted that Austrian AI startup fonio.ai will become one of Europe's breakout companies. 20VC, which has more than $650m in AUM and counts Perplexity, 11x, Linear, AgentSync, Poolside, Linktree, Nex Health, and Merge API among its investments, led fonio.ai's $17m seed round at a $140m valuation, which closed in June 2026. The company has surpassed $10m in ARR, growing from $1m to $10m ARR since the investment, and Stebbings said it will hit $100m in a further 18 months. Founded in Vienna in 2024 by CEO Daniel Keinrath and CTO Matthias Gruber, fonio.ai helps businesses deploy personalised AI agents for customer contact. The company has scaled to thousands of customers with only 60 team members, growing by an average of more than 30 per cent month over month since the start of the year, and is targeting ARR of €20-30m by the end of 2026. After making its first hire in June 2025, it has grown to 81 employees, including 17 who joined in the past month. With 52 positions currently open, plans include growing the team to between 130 and 150 employees by year-end, with a head of growth