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.
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.
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.
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.
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.