About Sondare

Our Motivation

We started Sondare with a simple question: why is so much investigative work still held together manually?

Why We Started

Investigative journalism plays a fundamental role in public life

It uncovers information that powerful institutions may have little incentive to disclose, exposes wrongdoing and systemic failures, strengthens accountability, identifies threats to public safety, and gives communities the evidence they need to understand how decisions are being made on their behalf.

Some of the most consequential reporting can take months or years. A single investigation may require reporters to trace financial transactions, reconstruct timelines, compare hundreds of records, connect people and organizations across datasets, verify conflicting accounts, and preserve the evidence behind every conclusion.

Yet the infrastructure supporting that work remains surprisingly improvised.

Teams work across databases, research platforms, AI tools, spreadsheets, shared drives, messaging systems, public records, interview transcripts, and personal notes. Each tool solves part of the problem. The investigator is left responsible for maintaining the connections between them.

We saw an opportunity to build something different: not another destination for individual research tasks, but a workspace designed around the full lifecycle of an investigation.

The Team

Who are we?

After meeting at Hack for Social Impact in San Francisco in 2025, Camila Loureiro and Daniel Donnelly decided to build Sondare, bringing together experience in strategy, research, operations, and software engineering around a shared belief that serious investigative work deserves purpose-built infrastructure.

Camila Loureiro

Co-Founder

Camila leads operations, go-to-market strategy, and customer development at Sondare. She brings experience leading strategic initiatives and executive operations at Minerva University, where her work spans complex cross-functional and international projects. At Sondare, she leads customer research and partnerships, working closely with investigative professionals to understand how long-term investigations are managed today and translate those needs into the company’s product and strategy.

Daniel Donnelly

Co-Founder

Daniel leads product and engineering at Sondare. He brings more than five years of experience across product management and full-stack engineering, with a focus on turning complex workflows into intuitive, usable systems. He has also spent more than a decade working for and alongside nonprofit organizations, bringing firsthand familiarity with the kinds of mission-driven teams Sondare is built to support.

Why Now

The tools around investigations were built for a different scale of work

Investigations are becoming more data-heavy, while the tools around them were built for a different scale of work.

Investigative teams now work across larger volumes of digital records, datasets, transcripts, communications, public filings, and multimedia sources than ever before. At the same time, AI has made it possible to search, compare, and synthesize information across those materials in ways that were previously impractical.

But most existing tools address only pieces of the workflow. General-purpose AI can help answer questions, databases can help retrieve records, and project-management tools can help organize tasks, but none are designed to preserve the full investigative context across sources, people, timelines, hypotheses, and evidence.

Complex investigations should not depend on fragmented systems.

Long-term investigations rarely live in one place.

Evidence is scattered across documents, spreadsheets, transcripts, databases, notes, emails, public records, and research tools. Names appear differently across sources. Timelines evolve. New information changes the significance of old information. Teams need to remember not only what they know, but where they learned it and what evidence supports it.

As an investigation grows, maintaining those connections becomes a significant part of the work itself.

Investigators compensate with increasingly elaborate systems of folders, spreadsheets, browser tabs, notes, databases, and manual verification. The tools may store pieces of the investigation, but very few help maintain the investigation as a coherent whole.

Sondare exists to change that.

Our Commitment

The workspace where complex investigations become defensible insights

Investigations have become more complex, but the tools used to manage them remain fragmented. Sondare is building the specialized workspace investigative teams need to keep research, evidence, sources, relationships, timelines, and analysis connected from the first document to the final conclusion.

Sondare brings the core components of investigative work into one persistent environment. Teams can organize and interrogate source material, track people and organizations, build timelines, document conversations, connect evidence across documents, preserve citations, develop lines of inquiry, and collaborate around the same body of research.

Instead of repeatedly reconstructing context across separate tools, investigators can build a structured body of knowledge that becomes more useful as the investigation develops.

The goal is not simply to help teams search their documents faster. It is to preserve the relationships between evidence, sources, entities, questions, and conclusions throughout the life of an investigation.

We believe AI should strengthen investigative judgment, not replace it.

The people doing investigative work remain responsible for interpreting evidence, questioning assumptions, evaluating sources, and deciding what conclusions can responsibly be drawn. We believe AI is most valuable when it helps investigators navigate complexity while keeping them close to the underlying evidence.

Evidence before answers.

An answer is only useful if an investigator can understand what supports it.

Sources stay connected to conclusions.

Synthesis should make evidence easier to examine, not obscure where information came from.

AI supports judgment. It does not substitute it.

Sondare can help retrieve, organize, compare, and surface connections. Interpretation remains with the investigator.

Investigative work requires trust.

Source protection, provenance, transparency, and control over sensitive material are fundamental product requirements, not afterthoughts.

Connections should be inspectable.

When Sondare identifies a relationship, pattern, or potential lead, investigators should be able to trace it back to the material that produced it.

Who We're Building For

Starting with investigative journalism. Built for investigative work.

We are beginning with journalists and investigative teams working on complex, long-term research and reporting.

Their work places unusually high demands on information systems. Investigations can span months or years, involve hundreds or thousands of pieces of source material, and require every meaningful conclusion to withstand scrutiny.

That makes investigative journalism an important proving ground for the kind of infrastructure we are building.

But the underlying workflow extends beyond journalism.

Researchers, watchdog organizations, public-interest legal teams, anti-corruption organizations, and other investigative professionals face a similar challenge: making sense of large bodies of evidence while preserving the path from source material to defensible conclusions.

Our Vision

Investigators should spend their time understanding the evidence, not reconstructing where it lives

We believe the infrastructure surrounding investigative work can be substantially better.

A team should be able to begin with a document and, months later, understand how that document connects to a person, an event, another source, a line of inquiry, and ultimately a conclusion.

Knowledge gathered early in an investigation should become more valuable as new evidence arrives, rather than disappearing into folders and forgotten notes. Collaboration should preserve context instead of fragmenting it.

And new technologies should make complex evidence easier to interrogate without weakening the standards of verification that make investigative work credible.

Our ambition is to build the operating workspace for that kind of investigation.

Early Access

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