Sonaa workforce management platform for frontline employees, raised $27.5 million in a Series A funding round.
More than two-thirds of the US workforce they are said to be in front line positions, which can be anything from customer service and healthcare to retail environments and hospitality. But managing this huge workforce, ensuring roles are filled and delivering services, is resource intensive. That’s where Sona has set out to help since it was founded three years ago.
“Sona intelligently develops our customers’ largest cost base – the front line of work,” Sona co-founder, Steffen Wulff Petersen, he told TechCrunch. “This not only optimizes their cost base, but also directly drives more revenue – you can’t sell food or deliver care without staffing properly planned.”
Founded in London in 2021, Sona helps companies manage almost every aspect of their workforce, from shift planning, timesheets and feedback to managing absences and liaising with agencies to ensure shifts are covered on time. duration of staff shortages.
Managers typically access Sona through a web portal, while employees access the platform through a mobile app that allows them to fill out timesheets, view available shifts, and communicate with managers. Companies integrate Sona with their internal systems to ensure that all data flows through and between various departments and stakeholders.
As you’d expect in this day and age, Sona says it uses artificial intelligence to automate many of the processes involved in managing a workforce, including optimizing rosters using data gathered from employee contracts, such as terms of employment, their work preferences and availability. So less time consuming manual admin is the name of the game.
“Running a business with a large frontline workforce is all about making sure the right people are in the right place at the right time,” Sona co-founder and CTO Ben Dixon told TechCrunch. “Sona becomes the central entry point for a large percentage of our customers’ operations, which means we integrate with almost all of their other systems — from care management and point of sale, to single-sign-on and ERP (enterprise resource planning). It is this deep level of integration that facilitates our AI product because we are the only system that can provide a unified view of real-time data across the entire enterprise.”
Apart from legacy players like People Planner in social care and Selima In the hospitality space, there’s no shortage of well-funded startups targeting a similar space to the one Sona operates in — there’s ConnectTeam and Homebase for starters, the latter of which announced a $60 million fundraising just last month.
Petersen says he plans to differentiate himself from at least some of those companies by focusing on larger enterprises, combining “consumer-grade design” with features required by more complex multi-site operations.
“Most of the newer VC-backed players in the workforce management space are built for SMBs, with an easy and simple self-enrollment product,” Petersen told TechCrunch. “This is a great approach for small businesses with 1-10 websites, and there are millions of these businesses to target. We rarely cross paths with SMB vendors because enterprise customers need the opposite product — one that handles deep complexity.”
Indeed, Sona’s pitch is not that fast to develop: Petersen states that the demonstration alone takes three hours, and the implementation takes more months or so. “Think Salesforce versus Pipedrive,” Petersen said. “We pass leads on to some of our SMB suppliers when customers don’t meet our corporate criteria.”
Extension
Sona currently lives in the social care and hospitality industries in the UK, where she counts Gleneagles and Estelle Manor as customers. With another $27.5 million in the bank, the company is now preparing to expand further – and a clue to its target markets lies in its new lead investor.
The Series A round was led by the Menlo Park-based VC firm Felix, which has previously exited investments such as Amazon’s Ring, Google’s Fitbit and publicly traded Shopify. Other notable backers include Google’s Gradient Ventures, which drove Sona’s seed two years ago. Antler, SpeedInvest, Northzone and Bag Ventures also participated in the latest round.
Sona has now raised $40 million since its launch, and the company said it will use the fresh cash injection to “build more advanced AI capabilities” and accelerate its international plans, which will include its first foray into USA.
“The US will be an important market for Sona. We now have both Felicis and Gradient, have hired our first two US-based employees, and signed our first six-figure Alpha customer,” said Petersen.