Sona, a workforce management platform for frontline workers, has raised $27.5 million in a Series A round.
More than two-thirds of the U.S. workforce reportedly works in front-line jobs in everything from customer service and health care to retail environments and hospitality. However, managing this large workforce and ensuring they perform their roles and provide services is resource-intensive. Sona has been committed to supporting this field since his founding three years ago.
Sona co-founder Steffen Wulff Petersen told TechCrunch that “Sona is smartly deploying its front-line workforce, which is our customers' largest cost base.” “This not only optimizes your cost base, but also directly increases your revenue. You can't sell food or provide care if your staff isn't scheduled correctly.”
Founded in London in 2021, Sona helps businesses on the front lines, from scheduling shifts, timesheets and soliciting feedback to managing absences and liaising with agencies to secure shifts during staffing shortages. We help you manage almost every aspect of your workforce.
Managers typically access Sona through a web portal, but employees can access the platform through a mobile app to fill out timesheets, view available shifts, and communicate with managers. I can. Companies integrate Sona with their internal systems to ensure that all data flows between different departments and stakeholders.
Sona in action. Image credit: Sona Image credit: Sona
As might be expected in this day and age, Sona says it uses AI to automate many of the processes involved in managing its workforce. This includes optimizing rosters using data collected from workers' contracts, such as their terms of employment, work preferences, and availability. Therefore, manual management is important as it saves time.
“Running a business with a large field workforce means ensuring you have the right people in the right place at the right time,” Sona co-founder and CTO Ben Dixon told TechCrunch. That is the most important thing.” “Sona is the central starting point for the majority of our customers' operations, which means we use them to power their other systems, from care management and point of sale to single sign-on and ERP (enterprise). It's this deep level of integration that powers our AI products, meaning we're integrated with almost everything (resource planning), allowing us to provide a unified, real-time view of data across your business. Because it's the only system.
In addition to traditional companies such as PeoplePlanner in social services and Selima in hospitality, there is no shortage of well-funded startups targeting sectors similar to those in which Sona operates. For starters, he has ConnectTeam and Homebase, the latter of which announced his $60 million funding. Just last month.
Petersen said the company aims to differentiate itself from at least some of these companies by focusing on large enterprises and blending “consumer design” with the functionality needed for more complex multi-site operations. He said that
“Most of the new venture capital-backed players in the workforce management space are built for small and medium-sized businesses with easy and simple self-sign-up products,” Petersen told TechCrunch. “This is a great approach for small businesses with 1 to 10 sites, and millions of businesses. Enterprise customers are looking for the opposite product, one that handles very complex functionality. We rarely interact with SMB vendors because we need them.”
In fact, Sona's pitch is not about fast adoption. Petersen says the demo alone took him three hours, and deployment could take several months. “Think of Salesforce and Pipedrive,” he says Petersen. “If a customer doesn't meet our corporate standards, we pass the lead on to some small business vendor.”
expansion
Sona currently works across the UK social care and hospitality industry and counts the likes of Gleneagles and Estelle Manor among its clients. He also banked $27.5 million and the company is now gearing up for further expansion. The clue to the target market lies in the new lead investor.
The Series A round was led by Menlo Park-based VC firm Felicis. The company has previously exited investments in companies such as Ring to Amazon, Fitbit to Google, and publicly traded Shopify. Other notable backers include Google's Gradient Ventures, which led Sona's seed round two years ago. Antler, SpeedInvest, Northzone and Bag Ventures also participated in the latest round.
Sona has now raised more than $40 million since its inception, and the company said it will use the new capital injection to “build out more advanced AI capabilities” and accelerate its international plans, including its first expansion into the United States.
“The U.S. will be an important market for Sona. We currently have both Felicis and Gradient, hired our first two U.S.-based employees, and grown our first six-figure Alpha customer. We signed a contract with the company,” Petersen said.