Sona, a comprehensive workforce management solution tailored for frontline employees, has successfully secured $27.5 million in a Series A funding round.
Frontline roles, encompassing sectors such as customer service, healthcare, retail, and hospitality, account for more than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce. The challenge of efficiently managing this extensive labor force while ensuring optimal role fulfillment and service delivery is significant. Addressing this need has been Sona’s mission since its inception three years ago.
“Our platform strategically optimizes our clients’ largest cost component — their frontline workers,” explained Steffen Wulff Petersen, co-founder of Sona, in an interview with TechCrunch. “This not only reduces costs but also boosts revenue directly. For example, you can’t sell food or deliver care without having the right personnel scheduled.”
Established in London in 2021, Sona provides an all-encompassing management tool for businesses to effectively handle their frontline workforce. The platform facilitates a wide range of functions, including shift scheduling, timekeeping, gathering employee feedback, managing absences, and liaising with agencies to cover staffing shortfalls.
Managers utilize Sona through a web portal, whereas employees engage with the system via a mobile app, allowing them to submit timesheets, access available shifts, and communicate with supervisors. Companies can seamlessly integrate Sona with their existing internal systems to ensure smooth data transfer and coordination across all departments and stakeholders.
As anticipated in today’s digital era, Sona leverages AI technology to streamline numerous workforce management processes. This includes optimizing staff schedules based on data derived from workers’ contracts, covering aspects such as their employment terms, work preferences, and availability. The primary objective is to reduce the time spent on manual administrative tasks.
“Managing a business with an extensive frontline workforce is largely about positioning the right individuals at the optimal place and time,” Sona’s co-founder and CTO, Ben Dixon, explained to TechCrunch. “Sona serves as the central hub for a significant portion of our clients’ operations, necessitating integration with almost all of their existing systems — ranging from care management and point-of-sale to single sign-on and ERP (enterprise resource planning). This high level of integration is what empowers our AI capabilities, as we offer a consolidated, real-time perspective of data across the entire business.”
In the competitive landscape, Sona stands alongside legacy platforms like PeoplePlanner in social care and Selima in hospitality, as well as a range of well-financed startups in the same niche. Examples include ConnectTeam and Homebase, with the latter recently securing a $60 million funding round.
Petersen emphasizes that Sona aims to set itself apart by concentrating on larger enterprises and combining “consumer-grade design” with features suited for more intricate, multi-site operations.
“Many of the recent, venture-capital-backed entrants in the workforce management sector cater to SMBs, offering straightforward, self-service products,” Petersen told TechCrunch. “While this approach is ideal for small businesses with up to 10 sites—and there are millions of such businesses to target—we seldom compete with SMB-focused vendors. Enterprise clients require a solution that can handle greater complexity.”
Indeed, Sona’s value proposition isn’t about rapid deployment: Petersen notes that the demo alone can last three hours, with full implementation taking several months. “Think of it as the difference between Salesforce and Pipedrive,” Petersen said. “We even refer leads to SMB vendors when a prospective client doesn’t fit our enterprise criteria.”
Expansion
Sona is making significant strides within the social care and hospitality sectors in the U.K., boasting clientele such as Gleneagles and Estelle Manor. Bolstered by an additional $27.5 million in funding, the company is poised for further international expansion, with hints about its future markets evident from its latest lead investor.
The Series A funding round was spearheaded by Menlo Park-based venture capital firm Felicis, known for its successful exits like Ring to Amazon, Fitbit to Google, and the publicly traded Shopify. Other prominent investors include Google’s Gradient Ventures, which led Sona’s seed round two years prior, and contributions from Antler, SpeedInvest, Northzone, and Bag Ventures in the recent round.
To date, Sona has amassed over $40 million in funding since its founding. The company plans to leverage the latest capital infusion to enhance its advanced AI capabilities and expedite its global expansion, specifically marking its entry into the U.S. market.
“The U.S. will be a crucial market for Sona. With the support of Felicis and Gradient, our first two U.S.-based employees onboard, and our inaugural six-figure Alpha customer signed,” said Petersen.
