26. Sona: workforce management for the left-behind industries

Founders: Steffen Wulff Petersen, Oli Johnson, and Ben Dixon
Year founded: 2021
Website: getsona.com

Evey business owner knows the chaos of organising a workforce. Managing leave, payroll, and timesheets is bad enough for an SME. Now imagine you’re in charge of a 3,000-strong cafe chain. Or the 20,000 agency staff that work in healthcare. One word: headache.

To managers at large-scale enterprises, workforce management platform Sona is one giant pain relief pill. It employs AI to manage just about every facet of the workforce, healing common pain points and enabling firms to finally lose the paper and spreadsheets. 

Construction, manufacturing, aviation, and sanitation are all industries that could benefit from this kind of solution. Cleverly, though, Sona has chosen not to stretch itself too thin. 

For now, it’s keeping its attention fixed on hospitality and care — two industries the founders know well. They previously spent six years building Catapult, a gig website for hospitality and retail. Catapult ultimately failed, but the learnings gleaned helped to launch Sona.

“It was a lightbulb moment when we realised how many repetitive processes there were in the frontline; exactly the kind AI would excel at solving,” say the founders. 

Among Sona’s intelligent AI tools is the Sona Shift Filler, essentially an ‘internal marketplace’ for employees to pick overtime shifts, without employers having to rely on agency staff (the NHS has been known to pay up to £2,500 per shift to last-minute nurse cover).

These kinds of tools are invaluable for hospitality and care, both of which are facing staff shortages, inflationary forces, and low margins. “Sona drives more intelligent deployment of labour, which directly translates into significant profit increases”, the founders explain.

Sona raised £21.1m in a Series A funding round last May, and it can count heavyweights such as Paul UK as clients. Its ambitions are equally intimidating; it wants to support the 2.7 billion frontline workers that exist globally. We think it’s more than up to managing the task.