Sona, a company based in London, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding round led by N47. Existing investors Felicis, Northzone, Gradient, and Italian Founders Fund also took part, bringing Sona’s total funding to over $100 million.
The company plans to use this new funding to expand into the US and speed up the development of its AI platform for industries such as hospitality, retail, healthcare, and logistics.
Sona is tackling a long-standing problem in workforce management. While the global market for workforce management software is expected to reach $9.76 billion by 2026, many businesses still use outdated systems. Companies with shift workers at multiple locations often depend on spreadsheets, manual scheduling, and separate HR tools.
Sona’s platform brings together scheduling, HR, payroll, compliance, and analytics. It uses real-time data such as bookings, revenue, weather, and shift history to make demand forecasts and staffing plans more accurate. This approach replaces expensive and often inaccurate time-and-motion studies.
Sona was founded in 2021 by Steffen Wulff Petersen, Ben Dixon, and Oli Johnson. Its customers include Popeyes and Tao Group. Sona’s newest product, Forge, lets businesses build custom internal software on its main platform. With this, Sona aims to become a core part of business operations instead of just offering a single solution.
Workforce scheduling is a highly competitive field. The top ten vendors, including UKG, Ceridian’s Dayforce, Workday, Oracle, Deputy, and ADP, collectively control 55% of the global market. Sona stands out by offering a major change instead of just small updates. Most established platforms were built years ago and are now being updated with AI, but they were not originally designed for it.
“Every other enterprise software category has been transformed by AI, but the tools managing the world’s largest workforce are still fundamentally the same systems that were built 20 years ago. We had a ten-year plan. AI made it a one-year plan,” says Petersen.
The company is growing its presence in New York and plans to use its Series B funding to boost sales and build enterprise partnerships in North America, competing directly with Deputy and UKG.
Early adopters have seen generative AI copilots cut schedule creation time by up to 70%. This puts more pressure on older vendors and gives AI-focused companies like Sona a chance to win new enterprise customers before established firms catch up.
