The Finnish tech company is solving one of the biggest pain points for both consumers and businesses. With an AI-driven voice assistant, routine customer service tasks are automated and calls are answered instantly. The company has now raised 12 million SEK in a pre-seed round to expand in Sweden.
Helsinki, 3 June 2026 – The Finnish startup Sono, founded in 2025, has secured 12 million Swedish kronor in a pre-seed funding round. The company develops voice-based AI agents that automate high-volume tasks in customer service and sales. Investors in the round included Maki.vc, Wave Ventures and Failup Ventures.
Sono offers a real-time call-handling solution with no hold queues, capable of managing everything from appointment bookings to customer inquiries. With this new funding, Sono plans to expand beyond Finland, focusing next on Sweden and other European markets. The company recently opened an office in Stockholm as part of that expansion.
Phone remains a critical channel for customer service, yet many organizations still fail to answer a significant portion of incoming calls during peak times. That harms the customer experience and leads to lost revenue. Sono’s technology enables automation of increasingly complex customer interactions in ways that were not technically feasible just a year ago.
In Sweden the problem is particularly acute; according to official statistics, there is a widespread labour shortage with more than 61,000 vacancies in the service sector, and 75 percent of Swedish small businesses cite staffing shortages as their biggest growth constraint.
“Our goal is simple: no customer should ever have to sit in a phone queue again. We automate routine calls so people can focus on more complex tasks that require human judgment and expertise. That improves the customer experience and makes work more meaningful,” says Aleksi Löytynoja, co‑founder and CEO of Sono.
Sweden is among the three European countries adopting AI the fastest, and throughout 2026 the market has matured quickly past simple chatbots. Sono’s platform combines speech recognition, large language models (LLMs) and integration with companies’ existing business systems, enabling end-to-end handling of the customer service flow. The AI agents can schedule appointments, route calls to the right person, answer common questions and conduct customer satisfaction surveys.
The solution integrates smoothly with legacy systems and is specifically designed for organizations with high call volumes. According to Aleksi Löytynoja, Sono’s AI agents are expected to have handled over 30,000 calls for 15 customer companies by the end of June 2026. The number of handled calls is currently growing by about 50 percent month over month.
“Companies continue to lose large numbers of customers and sales opportunities simply because they cannot answer all calls quickly enough. Sono addresses this problem with technology that enables businesses to automate large-scale customer interactions effectively and with high quality. We believe the company has the potential to set a new standard for how customer service and sales are managed via voice channels across Europe,” says Pauliina Martikainen, partner at Maki.vc.
Today Sono is particularly active in customer service for the automotive industry, but the solution has already expanded into sectors such as real estate and property management, as well as dedicated sales tasks. Going forward, the company plans to develop AI agents tailored for both customer support and proactive sales. The aim is to rapidly scale the technology into new industries and markets.
“Sono has impressed us with their focused execution and their ability to build future services in a way that is easy for end users to understand. The collaboration has proceeded smoothly, and everything has been handled professionally and according to agreement,” says Jussi Hietanen, IT manager at Käyttöauto.
Looking ahead, Sono sees voice-based AI becoming a core component of how businesses handle customer interactions. The new funding will primarily be used for product development and international growth.