Sona, an AI platform built for real economy businesses, has closed a $45 million Series B round led by N47, with participation from existing investors Felicis, Northzone, Gradient, and Italian Founders Fund. The raise brings Sona's total funding to over $100 million.
The round is not simply about scale. Sona is positioning itself as the foundational operating layer for large frontline organizations, combining scheduling, HR, payroll, and business intelligence into one integrated system and building AI-native capabilities on top of it.
Frontline industries — hospitality, retail, healthcare, logistics — represent hundreds of millions of workers globally. Yet the software managing those workforces has largely gone unchanged for decades. Businesses in this space typically operate across a patchwork of disconnected legacy tools, none of which talk to each other well and few of which were designed with modern data in mind.
Sona's AI-powered forecasting and scheduling system is already in use at companies like Popeyes and Tao Group. It draws on real-time data — bookings, revenue, weather, historical shift records, even factors like box office takings or road closures — and uses it to build dynamic, bottom-up operational models. The aim is not just to predict what will happen, but to define what optimal operations look like and identify where improvement is possible. This replaces costly and often unreliable traditional time-and-motion studies.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand its US presence and accelerate its platform development significantly. Co-founder and CEO Steffen Wulff Petersen has been direct about the ambition: AI has compressed their ten-year roadmap into one year.
A core part of that roadmap is Forge, Sona's enterprise AI application builder, which lets businesses write custom software using AI. Because Sona already sits at the center of an organization's operational data, any application built on Forge is automatically integrated with scheduling, HR, payroll, and reporting systems. This is the key differentiator: rather than another one-size-fits-all SaaS product, Sona is building infrastructure that organizations build on.
"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," said Petersen. "We had a ten-year plan. AI made it a one-year plan. The old SaaS model delivered one-size-fits-all applications that companies had to adapt to. The next generation delivers the infrastructure and agentic layer organisations build on, giving them the power to create the exact software their business needs. That's what Sona is becoming for the frontline economy."
Founded by Steffen Wulff Petersen, Ben, and Oli, Sona is headquartered in London with a growing presence in New York. The company was built on a clear premise: that the software category managing the world's largest workforce had failed to evolve. With core products now live, that foundation is in place for what comes next.
N47 led the Series B, with all existing backers returning for the round. Matthew Cowan, General Partner at N47, explained the thesis: "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. 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. We're extremely excited to partner with Steffen, Ben, and Oli in leading this round as Sona continues its journey to global category leadership."
