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

Together with my fellow co-founders, Oli Johnson and Ben Dixon, 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. 

When we founded Sona in 2021, we wanted to solve the unique challenges of frontline work with technology that empowers every employee, on every level of a large organisation.

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

Two years later, Sona is doing just that for over 100,000 people. We are grateful to the many organisations who have chosen us to support them on their digital journey, including Community Integrated Care, iVolve, Affinity Trust, Cartrefi Cymru, Yorkshire Care, Greensleeves Care,  and Livability, helping them deliver almost 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 Hayley Horwood and Richard Upshall. Together, they have more than 25 years of experience in the sector and their insights have guided us every step of the way. Expertise is also what brought us closer to our partners, including Nourish, Radar Healthcare, Camscope, and Lottie. We'd like to thank them for sharing in our vision of an integrated tech landscape.

This deep involvement has taught us that the complexity associated with multi-location, 1000+ staff operations is coupled with the pressure and responsibility to provide the best care possible. Social Care demands a state-of-the-art solution, built with the kind of technology that isn’t just the latest right now, but that is flexible enough to continue being state-of-the-art ten years from now and later into the future.   

The financing is a big step on our journey to becoming the go-to WFM for large Social Care groups, but - more importantly - it is an investment in the sector as a whole. Over the past year, we’ve seen demand for a next-generation solution like Sona increase fourfold. Our partners are looking to make their operations more efficient and reliable, improve staff satisfaction, and become financially sustainable organisations that can easily grow and support more people. 

The fact that we can confidently say Sona is a solution that pays for itself - and then more! - is something we’re incredibly proud of because it provides organisations with a new revenue source they can re-invest into employee wellbeing and a better experience for the people they care for. 

So, what does this mean for the Care sector?

• A truly intelligent AI-driven solution

  We want to empower Social Care enterprises to forecast their staff needs based on what is best for the people they support with maximum accuracy and automatically tailor their operations accordingly. This will help organisations speed up their scheduling, gain real-time views of their shift runs, and encourage growth in a way that tech simply hasn’t in the last decade. Previously, the focus was mostly on digitising paper-based processes, but as many organisations are now starting a vendor-replacement cycle, we want to provide them with a real next-generation solution. 

• 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 absences. Our goal is to build an end-to-end automated absence management workflow, which will cover Statutory Sick Pay, maternity leave, and more. This will help organisations remove all manual Payroll activities related to absences, saving time and reducing the risk of human errors appearing in Payroll data. 

• User-first technology

  One implementation challenge organisations have experienced with legacy software is low tech adoption rates from frontline staff. But what oftentimes is seen as fear of change, is actually a natural reaction to employee apps which were not designed to be accessible. The Sona mobile app - together with all our interfaces - is built with usability in mind and consumer-grade standards. We want to enrich this experience with even more features that make user life more efficient and increase satisfaction, particularly around self-service and onboarding new staff. We believe the first impression new employees get of their organisation and its processes is key to their retention.

• High-quality research and charitable contributions

  The feedback we’ve received for our industry-leading reports, webinars, and other research activities has always been incredible and we’re only looking to add more. Social Care is first and foremost about the people and the community. We plan to continue reporting on the pulse of the sector, bring together leaders and visionaries to share their insights, and always spotlight the many opportunities Care offers. At the same time, we want to expand our existing charitable contributions and make sure that we’re always giving back to those on the frontline.  

• 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. 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’ll be on the lookout for the best talent available.

Overall, with Sona, I like to think of it as building the “self-driving car” of running a large Care business. The last 20 years of workforce management were dominated by legacy point solutions that digitised simple paper processes. 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.

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 Care enterprises in the past and usher in a new era of intelligent WFM that drives efficiency, employee wellbeing, and, ultimately, the delivery of exceptional care.