Sona raises £22m to help large organisations access true AI-driven WFM

Together with my fellow co-founders, Steffen Wulff Petersen and Oli Johnson, we’d like to thank Felicis who led the financing with participation from Northzone, Google’s AI-fund Gradient, SpeedInvest, Antler, BAG Ventures, and the numerous notable angels who participated in the round. 

Sona’s mission has always been to solve the unique challenges of Hospitality work with next-generation AI technology that empowers every employee to drive productivity, on every level of a large organisation.

Sona co-founders Ben Dixon, Steffen Wulff Petersen and Oli Johnson

Today we are doing just that for a total of over 100,000 people. We are grateful to the Hospitality operators who have chosen us to support them on their digital journey, including Gleneagles, Exclusive Collection, The Pig, Insomnia Cookies, and more, helping them and other organisations deliver over 5 million seamless shifts.

Some of the most talented and motivated people around have joined us to make this possible, and I’d like to give a particular shout-out to Karina Coen, Paul Watson, Harry Salmon, Piers Lambert, and Ben Lee. Together, they have more than 50 years of experience in the Hospitality sector and their insights into labour productivity, demand forecasting, and what operators really need to succeed against market challenges have guided us every step of the way.

Alongside our exceptional development teams and our partners, they set the foundation of what a truly intelligent AI-driven WFM solution should be.

The Hospitality sector needs innovative solutions that are not only cutting-edge today but also versatile enough to be future-proof ten years from now and beyond. Our modern tech stack means that we can process the huge quantities of data generated in real-time to generate actionable insights. One (small) example of that this means in practice: we can make productivity suggestions for dinner based on what happened at lunch and provide real-time nudges if drinks or dessert participation is lagging.

It’s great to see Sona provide an industry-leading solution for such a critical area for Hospitality.

Having been involved with ever-evolving Workforce Management platforms for nearly ten years, the results seen with Sona are impressive – from smart AI-enabled dynamic forecasting to auto-scheduling and, importantly, employee preferences and a slick ‘consumer grade’ app for ease of use,” said David Campbell, tenured executive (Chairman, CEO) of numerous hospitality businesses (including wagamama, PizzaExpress, The Ivy Collection, Bill’s Restaurants, Ole & Steen) and industry employee initiative Hospitality Rising.

“Quite rightly, Hospitality businesses are driving productivity and efficiency while building customer service – Sona has demonstrated the ability to help grow sales and optimise staffing.

David Campbell
Hospitality CEO & Chairman

Over the past year, we’ve seen demand for a next-generation solution like Sona increase fourfold, particularly amongst Hotel groups. This pushed us to strategically outline how we'd like to become the biggest WFM supplier for Hotels, Casual Dining, and QSR groups in the UK.

So, what does this mean for the Hospitality sector?

• A truly intelligent AI-driven solution

  We want to empower large Hospitality groups to forecast demand based on (a lot) more than historic data and give them access to a labour productivity engine with maximum accuracy and real-time auto-scheduling.
  
  AI-driven technology is capable of including a number of variables beyond what legacy systems have been able to achieve, such as employee wellbeing forecasts, location geography, population changes, weather prognosis, and more. Organisations will be able to speed up their scheduling, gain real-time views of their shift runs, and encourage growth in a way that tech simply hasn’t enabled in the last decade. 
  

• Employee self-service technology

  Delivering an exceptional customer experience takes time, focus, and skill. We want to offer an app that supports managers and their teams to remove all admin distractions and channel their energy and drive into this goal. In addition to all our interfaces being built with usability in mind and to consumer-grade standards to encourage staff adoption, we want to enrich this experience with even more features that make user life more efficient. These updates will increase satisfaction, particularly around schedule and holiday self-service, clocking in and out for breaks, and onboarding new staff. We believe the first impression new team members get of their organisation and its processes is key to their retention. 

• Minimise the risk of human errors in HR & Payroll with smart workflows

  Our HR solution is already closely linked to Scheduling & Payroll, and they communicate seamlessly as solutions built to work together from day one should. The next step is to bring automation to HR processes, particularly around mass organisational chart updates, mid-period contract changes that affect holidays and payroll, and absences. Our goal is to build end-to-end automated HR workflows and Payroll activities that involve manual reconciliation, thus saving time and reducing the risk of human errors appearing in Payroll data. 

• A trustworthy partnership for all our UK customers

  Our partners have consistently highlighted how committed our Customer Success and Implementation teams are to always going the extra mile, helping them optimise and grow their business. At the same time, our customer feedback informs much of the product roadmap. We want to make sure that as we grow ourselves, we only improve this experience and provide even more comprehensive support every step of the way. For that we've been on the lookout for the best talent available.

My friend and Sona co-founder, Steffen Wulff Petersen, put it best:

“Overall, with Sona, I like to think of it as building the “self-driving car” of running a large Hotel group or a restaurant chain. The last 20 years of workforce management were dominated by legacy point solutions that digitised simple paper processes and offered basic versions of AI assistance. Sona is building the next generation of WFM with a truly intelligent platform that enables organisational leaders in complex, multi-location enterprises to put the right people, in the right place, at the right time; and to seamlessly manage their workforce end-to-end.”

Steffen Wulff Petersen
CEO & Co-Founder of Sona

We believe we can deliver this because our exponential growth has been driven by tangible factors: speed of product delivery, high configurability, and sector expertise. 

Unlike legacy platforms, Sona’s technology has been built from the ground up for real-time data processing and insights. Leveraging the Elixir programming language and large language models - similar to what powers tools like ChatGPT - we offer AI-powered real-time actionable feedback which helps drive intelligent decision making and leads to real workforce productivity gains. The trust of our investors so far has yielded a total of £30 million - funds that we see contributing to the development of the sector as a whole. 

“We are proud to lead Sona's Series A round and support its mission to empower frontline enterprises with cutting-edge workforce management solutions.” We believe in Sona's potential to redefine how businesses [...] manage their workforce, and we're excited to be part of their journey towards reshaping the future of work. Ben, Oli, Steffen and the Sona team have already helped over 100,000 frontline workers schedule shifts, and we know so many more will appreciate smarter software that enables their work.” 

Niki Pezeshki
General Partner at Felicis

As we continue to innovate, our mission remains clear: to transform the outdated tools that have hindered Hospitality groups in the past and usher in a new era of intelligent WFM that drives ROI, efficiency, employee wellbeing, and, ultimately, the delivery of an exceptional customer experience.