Sona8

YC company profile

Voice agents survey employees to map, improve & automate workflows

Sona8 uses AI voice agents to interview employees about how work gets done. Consulting, transformation and corporate development teams use it to hear from more people and follow up after changes.

Employees open a link and speak in their own language. The agent asks follow-up questions, and teams compare problems across sites and departments. We’ve completed 10,000+ employee interviews and signed one of the world’s top three consulting firms.

We’re building the context layer and operating system for strategy teams: combining employee knowledge with company data to understand operations, improve processes and put decisions into action. The same context will guide AI agents as they take over work, so the company keeps what it learns.

• YC batch: Fall 2026
• Founded: 2026
• Team size: 5
• Location: San Francisco
• Country: US
• Status: Active
• Industry: B2B
• Stage: Early
• Tags: HR Tech, Infrastructure, AI, Conversational AI
• YC partner: Nicolas Dessaigne

Founders

Anton Hantel — Founder/CEO

Founder at Sona8. Previously consultant at BCG. Left my MBA at MIT to pursue Sona8.

LinkedIn · X

Madeleine Malmsten — Founder/CTO

Founder at Sona8, leading tech. Previously principal engineer at McKinsey & Company / QuantumBlack.

LinkedIn · X

Thilo Tamme — Founder/CPO

Founder of Sona8. Previously, Project Lead at BCG X and AI Researcher at TUM for conversational agentic-AI.

LinkedIn

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 together at BCG, interviewing employees and repeatedly going back to them during implementation. On our evening runs, we started asking whether AI could make those conversations possible across an entire company.

We started building after BCG, while I was at MIT and Thilo was researching conversational AI at TUM. As pilots gained traction, we both left our programs. Madeleine brought her experience as a self-taught engineer, repeat founder and former principal engineer at McKinsey QuantumBlack.

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

Every major decision depends on context. Much of it sits with employees who know how work happens and why things fail, but that knowledge rarely reaches the people deciding what to change.

We’re building Sona8 into the operating system for strategy and transformation teams. We will combine what our voice agents learn from employees with company data to build a live model of the organization. Teams will use it to compare alternatives and understand what a decision would require across sites and departments.

The same model will be the context layer for AI automation. Sona8 will use it to deploy agents and coordinate execution, then learn from the results. Small teams will be able to steer company-wide change, with the organization keeping what it learns as people and agents move on.

Source: Y Combinator · Retrieved 2026-11-02. Company information is self-reported on YC.