Sonet.io emerges from stealth with $6 million in seed funding to onboard remote workers

Remote work has seen a surge in popularity since the covid lockdown in 2020. This has led to more companies adopting a hybrid or fully remote work approach. Despite its advantages, remote work poses some challenges as employees collaborate in distributed teams across various geographical locations.

One of these challenges is providing employees with simple and secure access to all the apps they need to do their job, at any time, wherever they are, regardless of their physical locations.

Enter Sonet.io, a Silicon Valley startup that helps organizations to fix remote work challenges for global and distributed workforces. Sonet enables organizations to onboard their remote workers in a matter of seconds from any device desktop or mobile. With Sonet, businesses can offer immediate and secure access, prevent data theft, and monitor user activity from any device without requiring any software installations, all while reducing costs by up to 10 times compared to traditional solutions.

Today, Sonet.io announced it has emerged from stealth with $6 million in seed capital co-led by The Hive and WestWave Capital. The startup will use the funding proceeds to accelerate customer acquisition and continue to invest in its SaaS platform to provide a seamless user experience, protect applications, servers, and data, and provide visibility into remote workforce activities.

Sonet.io was founded by CEO Dharmendra Mohan and Venu Banda to tackle the obstacles faced by the modern “workforce anywhere.” The company provides a simple and efficient solution for granting remote employees access to the necessary work tools. Prior to Sonet, Mohan launched two global security cloud services at Symantec and held leadership roles at Blue Coat as it grew from a startup into a $4.5 billion security company.

According to a recent Gartner study on the future of work, organizations are expected to encounter unprecedented challenges in 2023, including a highly competitive talent market, a fatigued workforce, cost control pressures, and the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence and automation. As a result, remote work is predicted to become a permanent fixture in the work landscape.

With Sonet.io, applications, and servers are protected through zero-trust access control, utilizing no-code policies and a user-friendly admin console that minimizes the need for expensive IT expertise.

The shift towards remote work has presented numerous challenges for organizations. With a distributed workforce, it’s essential to provide secure access to applications, intellectual property, and confidential data, all without hindering productivity or incurring excessive administrative costs.

Traditional approaches such as VDI servers, shipping secure devices, or installing security agents are often complicated, costly, and lack visibility into remote workforce activities. As such, Sonet is poised to help IT leaders seeking to provide their remote workforce with an exceptional experience, all while improving security and observability.

Commenting on the funding, Mohan said: “Our mission is to transform the remote work landscape by tackling its distinct challenges head-on. We are committed to enhancing remote worker productivity through a seamless, secure user experience that can be accessed from any device. Our innovative cloud-based solution eliminates the need for device agents, allowing comprehensive observability for remote workforces via a unified dashboard.”

“In the new world of remote work it has become mission critical to streamline the employee onboarding process,” said Nico Popp, chief product officer at Tenable. “Organizations would benefit from technology that enables instant, secure access to applications from any device that also provides robust security controls to help with threat mitigation without impacting employee productivity.”

“The fast-changing nature of remote and distributed work in the enterprise has outpaced traditional solutions like VDI, desktop-as-a-service and distributing enterprise devices or browsers,” said Kamesh Raghavendra, partner and chief product officer at The Hive. “Sonet enables enterprise IT to provide distributed workers with a much more enhanced experience at a fraction of the cost with unparalleled observability and security features. We look forward to working with the Sonet founders to become a leader in the remote work market.”