Sonaworkforce management platform for frontline staff, raised $27.5 million in a Series A funding round.
More than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce they are said to be working on the front lines, which might cover every part from customer support and healthcare to retail environments and hospitality. However, managing this huge workforce, ensuring positions are filled and services are provided is resource-intensive. This is where Sona has been going to help since its founding three years ago.
“Sona intelligently leverages our customers’ largest cost base – frontline labor,” Sona co-founder, Steffen Wulff Petersen, he told TechCrunch. “Not only does this optimize their cost base, but it also directly increases revenues – you can’t sell food or provide care without properly scheduling your staff.”
Founded in London in 2021, Sona helps firms manage almost every aspect of their frontline staffing, from planning shifts, rostering and obtaining feedback to managing absences and contacting agencies to ensure shifts are covered in the event of staffing shortages.
Managers typically access Sona through an online portal, while employees access the platform through a mobile app where they will complete timesheets, view available shifts and communicate with managers. Companies integrate Sona with their internal systems to ensure all data flows between various departments and stakeholders.
As you may expect as of late, Sona says it uses artificial intelligence to automate many of its workforce management processes, including optimizing rosters using data obtained from worker contracts such as employment conditions, work preferences and availability. So, less time-consuming manual administration is the name of the game.
“Running a company with a large number of frontline employees is all about ensuring that the right people are in the right place at the right time,” Sona co-founder and CTO Ben Dixon told TechCrunch. “Sona is becoming the central entry point for a large part 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 our AI product facilitates, as we are the only system that can provide a unified, real-time view of data across the entire company.”
Apart from older players like People planner in social care and Selim in hospitality, there is no shortage of well-funded startups tackling a space similar to the one Sona operates in — for starters, there’s ConnectTeam and Homebase, the latter of which announced a $60 million fundraising round last month.
Petersen says it intends to differentiate itself from at least some of those firms by focusing on larger enterprises by combining “consumer-grade design” with features required for more complex, multi-location operations.
“Most of the newer, VC-backed players in the workforce management space are aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, with an easy and simple self-signup product,” Petersen told TechCrunch. “This is a great approach for small businesses with 1-10 locations, and advertising targets millions of these businesses. We rarely see SMB vendors because enterprise customers need the opposite product – one that can handle deep complexity.”
In fact, Sony doesn’t claim the rollout is quick: Petersen says the demo itself takes three hours, and rollout takes greater than a few months. “Compare Salesforce vs. Pipedrive,” Petersen said. “When customers do not meet our enterprise criteria, we pass leads to certain small and medium-sized business vendors.”
Expansion
Sona currently works in the social care and hospitality industry in the UK, including: Gleneagles AND Estelle Manor as customers. With one other $27.5 million in the bank, the company is now preparing for further expansion, with a clue to its goal markets coming from a recent anchor investor.
The Series A round was led by a Menlo Park-based VC firm Happy, which has previously accomplished investments such as Ring to Amazon, Fitbit to Google and publicly traded Shopify. Other significant sponsors include Google Gradient Ventures, which led Sony’s seed round two years ago. Antler, SpeedInvest, Northzone and Bag Ventures also participated in the latest round.
Sona has now raised greater than $40 million since its founding, and the company said it will use the money injection to “build more advanced artificial intelligence capabilities” and speed up international plans, which can include its first foray into the United States.
“The United States will be an important market for Sony. We now have Felicis and Gradient on board, we have hired our first two employees in the US and we have acquired our first six-figure Alpha customer,” Petersen said.