The one-liner
Fondly is the autonomous review agent for local businesses. It listens, replies in your voice, and quietly escalates the hard ones to you.
The 100-word boilerplate
Fondly is a software company building autonomous AI agents for local businesses, starting with review management. Founded in 2026 in San Jose, CA, Fondly's first product replies to Google, Yelp, and Facebook reviews in the owner's own voice, and refuses to auto-post to unhappy customers, instead routing those reviews to the owner with a drafted reply and suggested fix. Fondly's mission is to give local business owners back the time they currently spend on the things software should already be doing for them. The company is backed by [investors] and serves [N] businesses across [N] states.
Founder bio
Tony DeAngelo
Founder & CEO, Fondly
Tony grew up in a family of small-business owners and watched them spend Sundays writing review replies instead of being with their kids. After [prior background, fill in], he started Fondly in 2026 to build the kind of software those owners actually deserve: warm, quiet, and on their side. He lives in San Jose, CA.
Contact: tony@getfondly.co
Logos
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Quick facts
- Founded
- 2026
- HQ
- San Jose, CA
- Founder
- Tony DeAngelo
- Team size
- 1 (hiring #2)
- Stage
- Pre-seed
- Pricing
- $99–$299/mo
- Customers
- 47 founding partners
- Categories served
- Home services, dental, F&B, auto, beauty
Suggested story angles
"Why an AI startup decided to leave 1-star reviews to humans"
Most of the AI hype cycle has been about more automation. Fondly is one of the first products to draw a hard line: never auto-post to an unhappy customer. The escalation gate is the moat.
"The voice profile vs. the fine-tune"
Why Fondly extracts ~20 style features from the owner's past replies and prompts Claude with them at inference time, rather than fine-tuning a per-customer model. Cheaper, faster, and more controllable.
"Local SaaS doesn't have to look like Birdeye"
A design-forward case study: how warm, lifestyle-brand UX is winning trust with owners who hate the dashboards their last vendor sold them.
"Sundays back: a software company that measures success in family dinners"
The founder's origin story and the metric Fondly tracks internally that no other SaaS does: hours of evening time returned to its customers.
Contact
Press inquiries: press@getfondly.co
Founder, direct: tony@getfondly.co
Response time: a few hours, usually faster.