Sonor: The Quiet Art of
Urban Intelligence.
A two-year entrepreneurial journey as Co-founder & Product Lead into the heart of city noise. Building an platform to transform invisible pollution into actionable insights for more silent, sustainable, and livable cities.
Role
Co-founder & Product Lead
Duration
2 years (2020–2022)
Team
4 co-founders + 1 dev
Client
Local governments
Industry
GovTech / Smart City
Context
Incubated at Matrice
Where this sits
A food & beverage execution agent for hotels. It tells a manager how many covers to expect, how to staff for them, and how to cut food waste.
- For
- Other agents via MCP, or a hotel / F&B manager with WhatsApp.
- Status
- Built, 0 real users, forecast in shadow mode, pilot partner in recruitment.
Headless environmental twin: street, weather and crowd signals turned into yield rules, exposed via MCP.
- For
- RMS, PMS and orchestration agents, not humans.
- Status
- Built, maintenance mode since July 2026.
A voice AI mentor that captures, qualifies, and leverages the tacit expertise from senior to junior collaborators. Just ask.
- For
- A junior technician on the shop floor, hands busy.
- Status
- Prototype, synthetic data, harness in CI.
Guest memory node: it keeps what a guest said and what happened, so nobody has to ask twice, without watching.
- For
- The nodes that need to know who is arriving.
- Status
- Synthetic PoC, production gated behind a data-protection assessment.
- SonorYou are here
Open-data SaaS mapping urban noise so cities can act on acoustic health.
- For
- European cities and metropolitan areas.
- Status
- Shipped 2020 to 2022, company closed.
The Curiosity
How do we reclaim silence in a world that's getting louder? We started with a simple question: "Can open-source data be the key to designing quieter, more livable cities?"
The Observation
Urban noise is the second largest source of urban nuisance in Europe. 25 million people are exposed to dangerous nighttime noise levels.
It generates multiple deep disorders (chronic stress, cardiovascular diseases, cognitive impacts in children) and carries a heavy social cost (48 000 deaths/year in Europe). Yet noise remains largely invisible and under-addressed by public policies.
Our first 2020 prototype
By making noise visible and data truly actionable (through real-time multi-source mapping, prioritized action plans, citizen engagement, and impact measurement), we could equip municipalities and urban planners with the tools to anticipate, act, and protect the most fragile resource of a city: silence.
From prototype to platform.
Data Synthesis
We designed and shipped a SaaS decision-support platform that aggregates and normalizes multiple open data sources, delivering high-fidelity, real-time city-wide acoustic mapping and actionable recommendations for urban planners.
Citizen Engagement & Urban Quietude
The platform puts residents at the center: citizens can report local issues and share testimonies directly. Planners receive prioritized action plans and can measure real impact over time, turning data into concrete public policies that protect acoustic health.
Quiet, Measured,
Returned.
Through partnerships with Banque des Territoires and Matrice, Sonor has become a vital tool for municipalities seeking to value acoustic health as a cornerstone of sustainability and territorial attractiveness.
Beyond the data points, the project proved that a quieter city isn't just a quieter city, it is a more humane, human-centric sanctuary for everyone who calls it home.
Stakeholder Interviews
Iterative Prototypes
Metropolises Met
Grants Secured
Explore the Platform
What Stakeholders Said
"Sonor finally provides us with the objective data we need to prioritize interventions and justify urban planning choices to our constituents."
Pierre Ferrari
Smart City Director, City of Arras
"Acoustic health is a major public health issue. Tools like this are essential to move from observation to action in dense urban environments."
C. de Clermont-Tonnerre
Paris City Councillor
"By bridging open data and citizen engagement, Sonor proposes a modern approach to tackling noise pollution at the territorial level."
Lauriane Rossi
Deputy, Pres. Nat. Noise Council
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did you stop the project?
The B2G sales cycles proved too long for an early-stage startup without significant bridging capital. While the pilot phase was successful, the timeline to secure recurring municipal contracts misaligned with our runway requirements.
How did you fund it?
We were supported by early grants (Bourse French Tech), incubation resources from Matrice, and a strategic prototype commission from Banque des Territoires, totaling approximately €20k in non-dilutive funding alongside sweat equity.
What were the key technical challenges?
Normalizing heterogeneous open-data sources, estimating noise propagation in complex urban canyons without dense IoT sensor networks, and building performant map visualizations that remained responsive with hundreds of thousands of data points.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the support of Banque des Territoires and Matrice association, and the collaboration of my three co-founders: Émilie, Majda and Benjamin.
Further Reading
Go Further
Noisy Cities: Behind the Scenes with Karim Douïeb
Discover how noise pollution open data maps of Paris, Brussels, and New York were made.
Read
Jura: A Forest Under Surveillance
Discover how data is used to preserve one of Jura's most important forests.
Read
TEDx: The benefits of the sound of silence
TEDx by Mathias Basner telling the dangers of noise pollution and the benefits of silence.
Watch