Before Steffen Wulff Petersen, Ben Dixon, and Oli Johnson founded Sona, they spent years working together on another startup called Catapult. They wanted to tackle what Steffen, its CEO, describes as the “last trillion-dollar category” – labour – and the idea was to build a new marketplace for it. They ended up employing around 10,000 frontline workers, and built the tech to manage them. Then their marketplace customers, who were big retail companies, started asking if they could use the product themselves. It was a “woah” moment, Steffen explains. “We realised there is a $500 billion ARR opportunity sitting there that we have built the tooling for…so we pivoted.”

In 2021 the trio founded Sona, a London-based software and AI company building the next generation tech stack for frontline workers. It launched with the backing of Google’s AI fund, and since then it has raised over $100m. Today it has a team of around 150 people, over 100 enterprise customers including Popeyes, Loungers, Tao Group, Pizza Pilgrims and Hawksmoor – and $20 million ARR. Perhaps the stat that matters most to the founders is that customers that use Sona can reduce labour costs by up to 10%. 

An overlooked workforce

While there is plenty of software out there to manage office and white collar workers, Sona addresses a gap in the market. It caters primarily to SMEs employing people in restaurants, shops, health and social care – businesses that often struggle to manage tricky shift patterns and complicated labour demands with existing tools. One reason Sona has been flying is that competition in this space was pretty non-existent. 

For its founders, it’s a lesson in looking for opportunities in places that may seem unrelatable, or even boring. As Steffen points out, the vast majority of VC funding goes into the white-collar world, even though the majority of jobs are blue-collar. “So it's very hidden from tech entrepreneurs,” he says. “They tend to find themselves in the white collar world, and have all of their life experience in the white collar world. But we lived in the blue collar world because we employed 10,000 blue collar workers for five years, and that taught us a lot.”

It's not like a productivity tool where it's like, oh, there was some bug and that's fine... If you run payroll for 10,000 people it has to be 100% right.

Building from the bottom up

Ben, CTO, says what makes Sona really stand out is that in the past solutions have always been top-down. Businesses would have to remodel their systems around a specific piece of software. “And we said, no, if you can model these businesses bottom up, if you could build a digital twin that models all of the processes and all of the complexity of this workforce, then at that point, you can start to reason about what great decision-making looks like.”

He gives an example of a restaurant group with five different brands underneath it. Once you’ve got a digital twin, “you can put agents over it that will say, ‘what does the best manager in this group of restaurants currently do?’ Let's now build an agent that matches that decision making.” Suddenly, with a push of a button, all those restaurants can have staff scheduled as if they were organised by its best manager. 

Solving a complex puzzle

At a high level, Ben explains, most of these businesses are trying to solve a supply and demand matching problem and rostering is one of the biggest controllable costs for these kinds of businesses. “The basic problem is that you don't necessarily have people that want to work at the time that you need them,” he says. “So what Sona is trying to do, or one of the cool things Sona does, is try and find ways to do that puzzle better.” One example of how it does this is by enabling a chain of restaurants to more intelligently move staff around different locations within a certain radius; getting the worker looking for more overtime to the location that is understaffed. The business can make more money, and when staff are getting the overtime they want they are less likely to quit. “When you stack up those optimizations that starts to make a real difference to the bottom line,” says Ben. 

Sona supports everything from rostering to HR, payroll to hiring. It is now rapidly increasing the number of product modules it offers, something it can do at an accelerated pace due to its own use of AI in development. Oli, Sona’s CFO, says that the challenge is that what they are building is highly complex, mission-critical tech for enterprise customers. “It's not like a productivity tool where it's like, oh, there was some bug and that's fine,” he says. “If you run payroll right for 10,000 people it has to be 100% right.” He adds: “It's easy to build like a little plane and you can jump off a cliff and it basically flies. We’re talking about building an A380.”