Since its foundation in 2022, Junto has risen to be among the most promising cohort-based education platforms. Junto offers personalized digital learning journeys with live sessions and events led by top operators for rising stars at growing companies. Recently, Junto raised a $5 million seed round from top-tier VCs, among them Earlybird and Picus Capital.
Initially, the digital Junto experience was built with a variety of no-code tools to enable rapid validation of user needs. With the successful completion of their seed round, the Junto founding team decided they needed to build their own digital platform quickly after their user understanding had matured enough. When Sonic joined Junto in Summer 2022, we initially ran product discovery to outline the ideal digital experience for Junto’s learners, customers and team. Sonic then rapidly scoped and built the first version of the Junto platform within just two months, and today the product powers the entire digital journey at Junto for learners, lecturers and the team. The Junto application has become a bar-setting product in the space and is driving Junto’s growth going forward. At the same time, the Sonic team partnered with Junto’s founders Marius and Johannes, to devise a strong recruiting strategy for Product and Engineering, which led to Rebecca joining Junto’s team as Product Lead in October 2022. Today, the Sonic team is actively driving forward Junto’s digital product, overall experience and growth together with the Junto team.
“I knew from the beginning of my recruitment process that collaborating with the Sonic team would be amazing. They are incredibly proactive and engaged and care about the Junto product as if it was their own. Their technical excellence guided us to achieve a well set up and scalable infrastructure of our learner and admin platform and enabled us to focus on what is most important: Our learners and customers at Junto.”
Enter provides out-of-the-box energy audits, procurement, financing and benchmarking for electrifying and heating European homes to make homeowners independent of gas, oil and electricity. Recently, Enter raised $5.8 Million in a seed round to scale their operations and enable house owners to work towards the 1.5-degree goal. Since its foundation in 2020, Enter has completed more than 3000 projects Germany-wide and is now significantly expanding its operations.
In Summer 2022, the Enter leadership team recognized the need to shift towards more scalable, self-serving processes for their energy auditing services and partnered with Sonic to develop their core product, a customer-facing Enter portal. The Sonic team quickly discovered, scoped and built the first iteration of the portal, allowing homeowners to access personalized recommendations for improved energy efficiency in their homes. Since the beginning, we crafted a highly complex, scalable technology setup around the systems needed to power Enter's application. A seamless user experience in onboarding new customers is as critical as high accuracy in the complex calculations the system produces at a rapid pace with dynamically changing data. Today, Sonic works with Enter to build an outstanding consumer product, scale their infrastructure in the face of starkly rising demand for Enter’s services and supports the team with product and engineering recruitment.
“We are truly excited about our partnership with Sonic. Their entire team is highly professional and goes above and beyond to build the best possible product experience for our customers. Their help has been invaluable as we shift towards more scalable, technology-driven processes and prepare for the next stage of growth and we are looking forward to continuing our partnership into the future.“
Mapify, founded in 2017 and incubated with support from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund, enables travelers around the globe to share their experiences with a community of adventurers. To create a seamless end-to-end trip experience, Mapify lets travelers book trips that have been shared on the platform, providing them with a full suite of transportation, housing and experiences. Today, Mapify’s community encompasses more than a quarter million travelers with immersive travel content in more than 190 countries. In 2022, Mapify was acquired by German-based vacation home leader HomeToGo.
At Mapify, our team initially focused on an outstanding content creation experience to attract content from talented photographers worldwide. The web and mobile product that was developed quickly rose in recognition and scaled into countries all over the world. While a strong backend infrastructure was needed behind the scenes, the team's focus on a beautiful user interface resulted in Apple recognizing Mapify with numerous awards in the global App Store. To date, Mapify is among the largest consumer products our team has worked on before Sonic was officially founded.
"Mapify is a social travel app that lets you “visualize, find and plan” individual travel experiences. You can visually document past and current travel experiences, including photos, descriptions and other details, either related to an individual experience or entire trip."
GLS/NXT drives digital innovation for GLS, the global logistics company delivering in 41 European countries with a yearly revenue of more than 5 billion Euro. Launched in 2022, GLS/NXT is driving initiatives in the areas of inhouse ventures, venture clienting, venture building and is especially accelerating the private consumer business for GLS Germany.
Shortly after having the fundamentals of GLS/NXT in place, the leadership team Jan and Max realized that they needed fast support in designing and recruiting their product and technology organization, move their digital product initiatives forward at the same time and outline a long-term tech roadmap that allows GLS/NXT to thrive while being well connected to the GLS Group technology ecosystem. After choosing to partner with Sonic for this mission, we defined different work streams around organization design and recruitment, product management for internal product initiatives and building the GLS/NXT technology roadmap. With that, Sonic is becoming an integral part of scaling this digital business unit from 5 to 25+ employees and beyond, leads in-house product initiatives for new GLS/NXT technology and defines the technological stack and strategy for the long-term growth of GLS/NXT as a thriving business unit of GLS.
“Working with the Sonic team is an incredible accelerator for the development of GLS/NXT. Their expertise in organizational design, recruitment, product and technology strategy is exactly what we needed after launching GLS/NXT. We see Sonic as a highly specialized product, tech and strategy consultancy, that perfectly integrates deep product, technology and strategic knowledge about modern digital products. We are excited to collaborate with Sonic and look forward to disrupting the logistics industry together!”
Sameday Health is a US-American healthcare company with locations nationwide. Having started during the Covid-19 pandemic with services in Covid-19 testing, the startup from Los Angels rapidly grew into 50 testing locations within a few months. The company has since expanded into other healthcare categories, such as wellness products, rapid Flu & Strep testing or primary urgent care services.
During the initial wave of Covid-19 response, time to market mattered enormously for Sameday Health. Sebastian, David and the extended team rapidly scoped the infrastructure for the Sameday Health end-to-end booking flow, which turned into the core digital product for the company. With strongly rising testing numbers, the technology system had to continuously be adjusted and extended, making it one of the most extensive technology products in terms of scale and revenue processed that our team has worked on to date.
"David, Sebastian and the team made a true impact at Sameday Health. We would not have been able to scale our technology systems as fast as we needed to without their product management and engineering. They built an infrastructure that processed millions of tests, including payments, in a matter of months. I am very grateful for their support of Sameday Health!"
Milano Vice is the fastest-growing virtual food brand in Germany. The Berlin-based team revolutionizes the food delivery industry by collaborating with local partners to provide the best food and best-in-class customer experience to every neighborhood. Currently focused on pizza delivery, the startup has the opportunity to expand across categories and countries. Recently, Milano Vice announced a €5.9 million seed round with renowned VCs, such as Speedinvest and Coefficient Capital.
After laying the operational groundwork for the launch of their business, the Milano Vice leadership team concluded that a sophisticated technology stack was needed to scale the business significantly. Milano Vice partnered with us to build a reliable technical setup for their Supply Chain and Operations to become a truly tech-enabled company. Sonic created powerful internal applications, implemented a solid and scalable data reporting infrastructure and developed technological approaches to challenges in Supply Chain and Operations. As understanding Milano Vice’s growth mechanisms in depth was crucial, we provided interim product management in addition to engineering support and strategic product and technology guidance.
“By partnering with Sonic, we immediately had an experienced group of people available to discover, plan and build technology for us. We needed solutions fast and that is what Sonic delivered. Since then, we have expanded our collaboration continuously and we are happy to have them on our side as continuous supporters, advisors and builders of technology for Milano Vice.”
Founded in 2020 during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gorillas, the 10-minute grocery startup from Berlin, quickly turned into a global phenomenon. Faced with the incredible demand for a never-before-seen service, the company raised more than $1B within less than two years and rapidly grew to thousands of employees. The startup quickly expanded all over Europe and even into the US, and rival Getir acquired it in 2022.
Patrick and Magnus joined Gorillas shortly after the company had raised their Series A funding. With only their CTO on board at this point, the company had no active product and engineering department. Within 1.5 years, Patrick, Magnus and additional leadership team members scaled the product & engineering organization from 2 to more than 130 people who worked on various customer-facing and internal products. During this time, the two of them built a multitude of teams, in which Lukas and Daniela joined them, among many others. The duo collected this experience before Sonic was officially founded.
“Working with Patrick and Magnus during my time at Gorillas was a fantastic experience. Both of them are highly effective leaders that grew our organization at a rapid pace. Their extensive knowledge in defining large scale product and technology systems enabled us to discover, develop and scale a wide range of products quickly, and to deliver a revolutionary experience to customers at Gorillas.”
Arive emerged in 2021 amid the hype around lightning delivery services and ships products like Macbooks, pearl earrings and vases - always from high-end brands. The company, founded in Munich, has since grown quickly and opened locations across Germany and even a store in Paris.
During our work with Arive, we explored different approaches to product and technology strategy with the two founders, Linus and Max, as well as with Arive's Head of Product, Arnon. Faced with rapid growth amid raising more than $20M, the startup needed systems from the very beginning that were built to scale, which we helped to outline strategically.
"Working with Patrick was an inspiring experience! His learnings at Gorillas, and from other last-mile startups, tremendously helped us prioritize our product and technology initiatives and to quickly move our app forward. I would be excited to work with him again in the future!"
WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management is a leading business school in Germany, renowned for its strong academic reputation and commitment to fostering entrepreneurial thinking and innovation. The Entrepreneurship Center around Max Eckel plays a crucial role by providing students and alumni with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to turn their entrepreneurial ideas into successful ventures. Whether through cutting-edge workshops, their accelerator program, or networking opportunities, the Entrepreneurship Center at WHU is dedicated to supporting the next generation of WHU founders.
Max and Niklas from WHU's Entrepreneurship Center identified the need to allocate and leverage the existing resources within the WHU alumni network more efficiently, especially within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. They partnered with us, an alumni-founded company, to develop a technology platform that connects WHU founders with the alumni community for mentorship, fundraising, and other resources. Thus, the platform will primarily help scale and automate the exceptional community work that Max & his team have already been doing. Our automation and scaling efforts address the numerous written introductions between founders and investors and the identification of experts for specific advisory and mentorship areas. Although the WHU EC x Sonic collaboration has just recently started, we are confident that we will help many WHU founders by making the WHU community resources more accessible and allocating them more efficiently.
"Working with Sonic is a really pleasant experience for us. The Sonic team approached the co-creation process in a very structured way, making it easy for our team and me to focus on our product vision. Most importantly, Sonic is not only thinking about how to execute our ideas but is challenging us where necessary and coming up with ideas which I am convinced will make the product even better."
Bounti is a B2B knowledge management and development platform that enables companies to educate and develop their deskless workforce. After having raised an angel round from top-tier angel investors, the Bounti team has built their first product version together with customers from the startup and corporate world.
After successfully raising their first major funding round, the Bounti founding team had customers willing to sign up for the product and start rolling it out to their employees. We connected quickly with Ziar and Deniz to go through their product and engineering strategy, review the steps to build a scalable product from the beginning and support them in recruitment and sales efforts. Our prior experience with companies such as Gorillas made it possible to craft the strategy and roadmap that have since enabled Bounti to sign up customers and scale its business.
"Reviewing our product and engineering strategy with seasoned founders from the Sonic team was incredibly beneficial early on. We were able to discuss our plans with people who have built large-scale software products before and identify what we needed to focus on."
The Berlin-based Startup fleat. enables companies to easily and efficiently offer last-mile deliveries to their end-customers. By managing a fleet of external riders and optimizing their utilization, fleat. provides timely last-mile delivery routes more efficiently and affordably than before. Large customers such as Gorillas, Beat & Roots, Wolt, Dean & David and more have relied on fleat.’s services.
As many similar operationally heavy business models, fleat. faced significant challenges in scaling operational processes through technology. In particular, managing rider operations efficiently was key at the start of the business but required manual work through email, phone, and spreadsheets. Together with fleat.’s founders Frank and Leo, the Sonic team started to discover, plan and develop an end-to-end logistics platform, supporting UI interfaces for complex order submission, backend validation and routing, including service area and time management as well as routing and payment processing. By leveraging Sonic's power, fleat. was able to automate and digitalize their entire customer journey from order submission, receipt generation to end-customer communication. Through fast integrations with third-party tools such as OnFleet, fleat. efficiently managed their riders based on existing and upcoming routes as well as historical utilization data. This allowed fleat. to run its operations smoothly with little to no manual work and ultimately provide a great user experience.
"Sonic opened a new chapter inside our startup. We build technology faster, more scalable and more reliably than our competitors. Our teams focused on what matters, the Sonic team takes care of the rest."