HomeCompaniesSona8
Sona8

Voice agents that talk to employees enabling transformations

Sona8 is a voice agent that talks to every employee about how their work gets done. Consulting, transformation and corporate development teams spend a large part of every project on stakeholder interviews and stakeholder alignment, and still only hear from a small share of the people affected. Each employee gets a link and talks to the agent for about 20 minutes. The agent asks follow-up questions, for example why a step is still done by hand or who else is involved. From the conversations we build process maps and a list of the problems people described, by site and team. During the implementation, the agent goes back to the employees involved after each initiative and asks whether it was implemented and what changed. The result is a project management office that has talked to every employee. Today consulting firms buy it for the stakeholder interviews at the start of an engagement. Transformation and corporate development teams buy it to run the implementation of a change program. Over time this becomes the way a company knows how it runs. Sona8 reads the systems the company already uses, connects them to what employees said, and keeps the picture current by asking again. Before a decision, you ask what it would do across sites and teams and get an answer from the whole company. A small team steers a company-wide program that used to need a large one. And AI agents inside the company come here first to learn how the work is done before they change anything.
Active Founders
Anton Hantel
Anton Hantel
Founder/CEO
Founder at Sona8. Previously consultant at BCG. Left my MBA at MIT to pursue Sona8.
Madeleine Malmsten
Madeleine Malmsten
Founder/CTO
Founder at Sona8.
Thilo Tamme
Thilo Tamme
Founder/CPO
Founder of Sona8. Previously, Project Lead at BCG X and AI Researcher at TUM for conversational agentic-AI.
Hear from the founders

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

Thilo and I worked on the same consulting project. We did over 70 stakeholder interviews, then had to manage the stakeholders during implementation, which meant aligning the same people over and over. In the nights we went running a lot in that time. On one of those runs we started asking what if we automated the whole thing. An AI would be strictly better at every step. It asks better questions because it has heard the other interviews, it analyzes with all the context, and it can go back a month later and ask again.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

Every big decision in a company is a choice between alternatives. The alternatives you see depend on the context you have. The context that matters most, how the work is done and where the problems are, sits with thousands of employees and never reaches the people who decide.

If we succeed, that context reaches them. Every employee talks to Sona8, and Sona8 plugs into the ERP, the HR system and the ticketing tools. Together that is a live map of how the company runs, and far more than any team can read. The hard part is finding, out of all of it, what matters for one question, and then adding the atomic insights and the judgment. This way, transformation, strategy and consulting teams operate far leaner and faster. Three people steer a program across 20,000 employees.

On top of the map we build a synthetic layer of employees. Before a decision, you run it against that layer and see what it does across sites and teams.

The same map is the enterprise context layer for AI agents. Before an agent changes a process, it reads how that process is done today and by whom. Sona8 is where that map lives.

Sona8
Founded:2026
Batch:Fall 2026
Team Size:4
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Primary Partner:Nicolas Dessaigne