AI eliminates phone queues – Sono raises 12 million SEK for voice-controlled AI solution

The Finnish technology company is tackling one of the biggest annoyances for both consumers and businesses. With an AI-powered voice assistant, routine customer service tasks are automated and calls are answered instantly. Now the company has raised SEK 12 million in a pre-seed round to grow in Sweden.

Helsinki, June 3, 2026 – The Finnish startup company Sono, founded in 2025, has raised SEK 12 million in a pre-seed round. The company develops voice-based AI agents that automate high-volume tasks in customer service and sales. The funding round was led by Maki.vc, Wave Ventures and Failup Ventures.

Sonos The solution answers calls in real time without any phone queues, and can handle everything from appointment bookings to customer inquiries. With the new capital behind it, Sono plans to expand outside Finland, with the focus on Sweden and other European markets as the next step. Among other things, it has recently opened an office in Stockholm.

The phone remains a critical channel for customer service, but many organizations still fail to answer a significant portion of incoming calls during peak hours. This degrades the customer experience and leads to lost revenue. Sonos technology makes it possible to automate increasingly complex customer interactions in a way that was not technically possible just a year ago.

In Sweden the problem is particularly evident; according to Statistics Sweden There is a widespread labor shortage with over 61,000 vacant jobs in the service sector, and 75 percent of Swedish small businesses cite a shortage of personnel as their biggest obstacle to growth.

“Our goal is simple: no customer should ever have to wait in line on the phone again. We automate routine calls so people can focus on more complex tasks that require human judgment and expertise. This both improves the customer experience and makes work more meaningful,” says Aleksi Löytynoja, co-founder and CEO of Sono.

Sweden is one of the three countries in Europe that adopts AI fastest, and in 2026 the market has quickly matured beyond simple chatbots. Sonos' technology combines speech recognition, large language models (LLMs) and companies' own business systems into a single platform, which can manage the entire customer service flow from start to finish. The AI agents can book appointments, route calls to the right person, answer common questions and conduct customer satisfaction surveys.

The solution integrates seamlessly with existing systems and is specifically designed for businesses with high call volumes. According to Aleksi Löytynoja, Sonos AI agents are expected to have handled over 30,000 calls for 15 customer companies by the end of June 2026. The number of calls handled is currently growing by around 50 percent month-on-month.

“Companies continue to lose large numbers of customers and sales opportunities simply because they don’t have time to answer all calls quickly enough. Sono solves this problem with technology that enables companies to automate large-scale customer interactions efficiently and with high quality. We believe the company has the potential to set a completely new standard for how customer service and sales are handled via voice channels in Europe,” says Pauliina Martikainen, partner at Maki.vc.

Currently, Sono is particularly active in customer service for the automotive industry, but has already expanded its solution to sectors such as the real estate industry and property management, as well as to pure sales assignments. In the future, the company plans to further develop AI agents adapted for both customer support and proactive sales. The goal is to quickly scale up the technology to new industries and markets.

– Sono has impressed us with its purposeful implementation and its ability to build the services of the future in a way that is also easy for end users to understand. The collaboration has flowed smoothly, and everything has been handled professionally and completely according to agreement, says Jussi Hietanen, IT Manager at Käyttöauto.

Looking ahead, Sono sees voice-based AI becoming an important part of how companies manage their customer interactions. The funding will be used primarily for product development and international growth.