Join Sona
There's a question no one in AI wants to ask.
If a model's face sells a product, who gets paid? The model, or the machine?
Right now, the answer is the machine. Brands are generating faces that don't exist, built from datasets of people who never consented. The $100B creator economy talks about empowerment. AI talks about efficiency. No one's talking about the people caught in between.
We are.
What we believe
We believe AI should make people more valuable, not less. That a model's likeness is not training data. It's labor, identity, and art. That the future of commercial imagery isn't fake humans. It's real humans, amplified.
Sona is an AI model marketplace where real people license their likeness for AI-generated commercial content. Brands get studio-quality imagery in minutes. Models get paid every time their face creates value.
Not stock photos with a filter. Not deepfakes with a disclaimer. A new category where the person in the image is real, consenting, and compensated.
We think this is one of the most important design problems of the next decade: building the economic infrastructure for the human side of AI.
Where we are
We're early. Really early.
Two co-founders. A working product. A conviction that won't shut up.
We've built the platform, the generation pipeline, the payment rails, and the onboarding flow. We've talked to models, photographers, agencies, and brands. We know what breaks and what clicks.
What we don't have yet is you.
Who we're looking for
We're not hiring for a role. We're looking for co-founder #3, and maybe #4 and #5.
People who build things on weekends not because someone told them to, but because they couldn't stop themselves. People who've shipped something, anything, and felt that specific mix of terror and pride when real users touched it for the first time.
We don't care about your degree, your resume, or your title. We care about your work.
Specifically, we're drawn to people who live in one or more of these worlds:
Making things people can see and feel. Design, frontend, brand, motion, creative direction. You think in interfaces and you obsess over the details that most people never notice but everyone feels.
Making things that actually work. Fullstack, infra, ML, pipeline. You've been the person who held the whole thing together with code and duct tape at 2am and somehow shipped it by morning.
Making things people want. Growth, community, creator economy, go-to-market. You've built an audience, launched a product, or grown something from zero with nothing but taste and hustle.
If you've done all three, we should probably talk yesterday.
What we're offering
Honesty first: we're a pre-seed startup with months of runway, not years. We can't offer stability, a signing bonus, or free kombucha.
What we can offer:
Real equity in a real company solving a real problem. A founding team that builds fast, argues honestly, and ships weekly. The chance to shape a product, a brand, and a category from the earliest possible moment. And the kind of work that, years from now, you'll point to and say, I built that before anyone believed in it.
We're based in LA.
How to reach us
Don't send a resume.
Send us something you've made. A website, a side project, a product, a portfolio, a community you built, an app you shipped, a video you edited, a brand you designed. Anything that shows us how you think and what you care about.
One link is enough. A few words about why this caught your eye won't hurt.
lucas@sonamuse.com
We read everything.
Sona. Real Humans, Digital Reach.
