Insider Brief
- Sona raised $45M in Series B funding, bringing total funding to over $100M, to accelerate US expansion and rapidly deploy its AI-driven workforce platform.
- The platform integrates scheduling, HR, payroll, and real-time data to optimize staffing, improve operations, and reduce costs for frontline industries such as hospitality, retail, and healthcare.
- Sona is positioning itself as an AI-native operational foundation, enabling businesses to build custom applications through its Forge platform while replacing fragmented legacy software systems.
PRESS RELEASE — Sona, the AI platform for real economy businesses, has turned what was a ten-year product vision into a one-year execution plan. With core products already powering scheduling, HR, payroll and other business-critical workflows, Sona is fast-tracking its evolution into the operational foundation these organizations run on — the platform providing the infrastructure, collaborative agents and AI environment they use to power their entire business.
Sona has raised $45 million in Series B funding led by N47, with participation from existing investors Felicis, Northzone, Gradient, and Italian Founders Fund, bringing its total funding to over $100 million. The round will accelerate Sona’s US expansion and bring forward a decade of planned platform capabilities into customers’ hands within a matter of months.
The only software a frontline organization needs
Real economy industries, from hospitality and retail to healthcare and logistics, represent hundreds of millions of workers and a multi‑billion‑dollar software market, yet these businesses typically run on a vast number of disconnected legacy tools.
Sona’s AI-powered forecasting and scheduling enables businesses like Popeyes and Tao Group to better manage how their business is staffed, ensuring they have not just the right number of people but the people best suited to the shift working at the busiest times.
This is combined with Sona’s labor AI platform, which takes real-time data about bookings, revenue, weather and every shift ever worked — along with any other factor which may impact a business, from box office takings to road closures — and builds bottom-up models which evolve in real time to predict not just what will happen but, based on historical productivity, what optimal operations look like and where there are opportunities for improvement. This completely removes the need for legacy time-and-motion studies, which are notoriously expensive and inaccurate.
Together, this drives up sales and customer experience, all while creating multi-million-dollar labor savings at a time of rising costs and competition.
Because Sona is the primary system of record for these businesses, sitting across scheduling, HR, payroll and BI, it’s also the logical foundation on which to build custom agentic applications. Sona has recently launched Forge, an enterprise AI application builder, which allows them to write custom software using AI that is automatically, securely deployed and integrated with all of their core data and their primary analytics and reporting platform.
This allows businesses to buy best-in-class solutions to the parts of a business which are standard and then build custom software on top for the bits which make them unique.
“Every other enterprise software category has been transformed by AI, but the tools managing the world’s largest workforce are still fundamentally the same systems that were built 20 years ago,” said Steffen Wulff Petersen, co-founder and CEO of Sona. “We had a ten-year plan. AI made it a one-year plan. The old SaaS model delivered one-size-fits-all applications that companies had to adapt to. The next generation delivers the infrastructure and agentic layer organisations build on, giving them the power to create the exact software their business needs. That’s what Sona is becoming for the frontline economy.”
“In a global market supporting billions of workers, AI represents a unique opportunity to uproot entrenched, outdated frontline tools and usher in a new way of operating for the real economy,” said Matthew Cowan, General Partner at N47. “Sona has built the leading, end-to-end AI-native product for workforce management, with best-in-class capabilities that enable it to become the operational foundation these organizations run on. We’re extremely excited to partner with Steffen, Ben, and Oli in leading this round as Sona continues its journey to global category leadership.”
About Sona
Sona is the AI platform for frontline enterprises, helping large organisations run more efficient operations at scale while delivering better service. Designed with AI at its core, it combines regulated workforce infrastructure — including scheduling, HR, payroll and compliance — with the operational data layer organisations build on to create the software they need. Headquartered in London with a growing presence in New York, Sona is backed by N47, Felicis, Northzone, Gradient, and others.
For more information: sona.ai
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Sarah Cohen
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