Steffen Wulff Petersen’s eye for the “next trillion dollar opportunity” led him to the frontline economy, and to building the digital connective tissue it now relies on
Steffen Wulff Petersen never set out to build Sona.
A seasoned entrepreneur, and former Rocket Internet MD, Steffen was actually in the midst of scaling another business. Catapult, built with Ben Dixon and Oli Johnson, was a marketplace for shift work, connecting over 10,000 frontline workers to gigs in retail and hospitality.
But like some of the best breakthroughs, they stumbled upon their discovery by accident, in the real world.
These people - working in care homes, managing restaurants, stacking supermarket shelves - that represented over half of the workforce had been forgotten by digitization. While knowledge economy jobs were served by an explosion of platforms like Workday, Deel, and Rippling, blue collar jobs had been left behind by software. It was hardly surprising: tech entrepreneurs like Steffen knew little about the frontline economy and naturally built for industries they knew.
"They tend to find themselves in the white collar world, and have all of their life experience in the white collar world,” Steffen says.
Conversely, he’d found himself in this brand new world, with over 10,000 workers and their employers crying out for the same wave of innovation that had transformed other markets. When the signal is this clear, you don’t hesitate.
Shifting gears and pivoting led Steffen and his co-founders to Sona, the frontline workforce management platform they run today, transforming the hard edge of work that many thought had been forgotten by technology.
A school for entrepreneurship
Steffen reflects on his early years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He laughs to himself, comparing it to the modern “996” founder phenomenon. “Try investment banking…it’s a great place to learn not to sleep.” Seven days a week in the office, finishing after midnight every day, taking five-minute naps in the toilet cubicles when you could.
It may have been a valuable lesson in how hard he could push himself, but he was never cut out for that sort of corporate career. “I’m far too entrepreneurial for that sort of structured environment,” he says.
A change in course found Steffen setting up the London office for Rocket Internet, an incubator that has been a sort-of founder university for many successful European businesses. He describes it as “institutionalized entrepreneurship”, a middle ground between founding a business and working in a corporation where ambitious founders can try their hand at venture building.
Rocket trained his eye for opportunity, and gave him great insight into how to replicate successful business models and expand quickly into new markets. Most importantly, it taught him about ambition. “You think about IPO from day one."
This insight quickly proved invaluable. Identifying Amazon’s shortcomings in Southeast Asian markets, he co-founded Lazada, an e-commerce platform serving 600M people across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Where Amazon had failed, mostly due to large parts of the population accessing the internet mostly through their phones, Lazada quickly expanded. Within three years, Lazada had processed over $1BN in gross merchandise value with roughly 10,000 employees across the region. Another huge regional player, Alibaba, soon came calling and acquired the business for $3.5BN.
The acquisition was powerful proof for Steffen of this pragmatic approach. “It was really good to think strategically from the beginning about what might be the exit path for this company. It's a very different thing to actually realize the value, to actually get someone to pay billions in cash."
The founding insight behind Sona
Where Lazada and Rocket had taught him about this methodical approach to entrepreneurship, Steffen knew that bigger opportunities would require less conventional thinking. "You cannot really institutionalize entrepreneurship. It’s very creative and you can't box it in like that."
His mind turned to new opportunities, to the frontline economy, and to Catapult. With the original view to build a marketplace for retail and hospitality gig workers, the legal framework in the UK meant that Catapult ended up employing 10,000 workers on their platform.
And that’s where the breakthrough happened. Without any suitable software to manage a workforce that size, Steffen, Oli, and Ben started building their own internal tooling. Companies who were employing their workers caught on, and started asking to use their tooling too.
"We realized there was a $500BN ARR opportunity sitting right there that we had already built the tooling for," Steffen recalls. "So we pivoted."
Frontline workers are typically slow to adoption: no work email addresses, no standardized workplace communications tools. To succeed, Steffen knew that Sona had to be their whole end-to-end experience: where they see their shifts, request time off, check payslips, message their manager, and more recently, receive AI-assisted support or advice.
That meant no narrow wedge product: the starting point for Sona was to piece together this disparate landscape of tools and products - from HR and payroll to time and attendance trackers - that currently served the blue collar market. This “fragmented legacy spaghetti," as Steffen describes it, was an outdated, not-fit-for-purpose experience that was loosely glued together.
“We were going to rip out like 10 or 15 different pieces and put them into one native stack," an experience he describes as “building a plane while taking off”.
Fortunately, Steffen and his co-founders were coming to this challenge from a significant vantage point. With powerful, emerging AI at their disposal, they had a vision to be more than just connective tissue: their platform could be intelligent, with a stack of tools that could act, and not just store data.
“Passion, hard work, customer dedication”
Demand for this new, intelligent software for frontline workers arrived fairly quickly, before they’d even painted the whole picture.
"When you get a customer in your first year before you have any credibility or even a product to show them, and they sign the biggest, six-figure, five-year contract with no get-out clauses - you know you're solving a very big, important problem."
Today, Sona is used by a huge range of companies in the UK. The fast-food chain Popeyes has been one of Steffen’s personal highlights, where he believes they’ve saved them between 5% and 10% of labor costs. Popeyes’ early adoption has seen them become a power user for Sona, constantly driving conversations to build new features and cover more aspects of their employees’ experience.
Other key case studies include Liaise, the UK care provider, who are currently saving £1M a year through Sona, and the equivalent of around 40 hours a week of admin time.
AI has been critical to the pace at which they’ve been able to grow the platform and its reach. “We've been hyper-focused on using AI in the most aggressive way because our rate-limiting factor is product velocity."
Usage of Sona's AI agents is growing 100% per month as they increasingly help frontline businesses optimise their operations at scale - across forecasting, productivity, scheduling and HR - and across every level of the organisation from CFO to frontline worker.
These opportunities have propelled the growth of the company. Alongside a $45M Series B the company raised this year, Steffen has seen the company grow to close to 200 people. His role as CEO has had to become far more intentional (“you have to lead a lot more through communication to make sure everyone's on the same page”), as has the company’s culture.
“Passion, hard work, customer dedication, curiosity” are the total non-negotiables that Steffen looks for in every hire. This becomes even more important, as Sona eyes up US expansion. Rather than being able to concentrate culture around an in-person, face-to-face office environment, the team is increasingly fragmented around various cities and hubs across the breadth of the US.
“You've got to put a lot of effort into making that culture explicit.”
From 10-year vision to one-year plan
As leader of the business, Steffen spends a lot of time thinking about what they got right, what they got wrong, and the processes they use to discern the difference. He’s wary of overly celebrating success, critically differentiating “fast-running water” and “good execution”.
"Just because a company did something well does not mean the different functions within it were necessarily doing a good job. They could have been holding it back."
From the beginning, Steffen and his co-founders believed the frontline stack they were building should eventually run itself: not just organize a manager's day, but act on their behalf. What's changed is how quickly it's become possible to build. "We had a ten-year plan," Steffen says. "AI made it a one-year plan."
As opposed to developing individual products and the one-size-fits-all modules of old software businesses, he describes Sona as "the infrastructure and agentic layer", using Sona’s data and knowledge of frontline businesses to help customers assemble the exact tools they need. This never felt like a pivot, but rather an inevitability. Technology catching up with their ambition to build a unified, intelligent stack to support frontline workers.
His vision remains as bold as ever. Their current platform is destined to disappear, replaced instead with an always-on AI back office at every employee’s fingertips. It completely changes how you run a frontline organization, whether that’s a restaurant or a care home. “We want to see an earpiece with a manager chatting to AI, which is subsequently taking actions for them.”
In Steffen’s vision, AI is not a threat to these frontline roles, but rather expands them. He reaches for an analogy from an entirely different profession: demand for legal help, he argues, is "10 or 100 times bigger than what's being serviced today". Productivity augments the market, rather than automating away the people powering it.
Frontline work, once hidden away from technological innovation and venture capital, is on path to the same destination. Jobs will look vastly different, but opportunities will grow and the quality of work will greatly improve. “I’m very very net positive on it,” Steffen says.
