Sona Raises $45 Million to Expand AI Platform for Frontline Businesses

Sona raised $45 million in a Series B funding round to accelerate the expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) platform for frontline businesses such as hospitality, retail, healthcare and logistics.

The company currently offers core products that power scheduling, human resources (HR) and payroll. Next, it plans to deliver infrastructure, collaborative agents and an AI environment that can be used to power an entire business, Sona said in a Wednesday (April 1) press release.

Because Sona’s platform already handles scheduling, HR and payroll, it is the logical foundation for building custom agentic applications, according to the release.

Sona recently launched an enterprise AI application builder called Forge that allows businesses to write custom software that is deployed and integrated with their data and the platform they’re already using, per the release.

“The old SaaS model delivered one-size-fits-all applications that companies had to adapt to,” Sona Co-founder and CEO Steffen Wulff Petersen said in the release. “The next generation delivers the infrastructure and agentic layer organizations build on, giving them the power to create the exact software their business needs. That’s what Sona is becoming for the frontline economy.”

Sona’s Series B round brings the company’s total funding to over $100 million, according to the release. The company raised $27.5 million in a Series A funding round announced in May 2024.

The latest round was led by N47, per the Wednesday release.

“In a global market supporting billions of workers, AI represents a unique opportunity to uproot entrenched, outdated frontline tools and usher in a new way of operating for the real economy,” N47 General Partner Matthew Cowan said in the release. “Sona has built the leading, end-to-end AI-native product for workforce management, with best-in-class capabilities that enable it to become the operational foundation these organizations run on.”

In N47’s own blog post about the Series B, Cowan and N47 Partner Fred Ellis said that while frontline businesses employ more than half of the British, European and American workforce, the software supporting these industries is outmoded and unprepared for AI.

“In real terms, Sona’s AI-driven workflows mitigate the frustration and time sink for managers of complex but critical administrative processes,” Cowan and Ellis wrote. “Now, they can optimize these processes to ensure frontline workforce businesses have the right number of staff and skill sets to meet the customer demand of the moment.”

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