Owen Lombardi and his girlfriend kept a shared calendar and updated it religiously. Every entry meant typing out what the event was, setting the time, and color-coding it by hand.
“Every time I added an event, whether it was for work, a family event or a dinner, it took forever,” Lombardi said.
Lombardi, a freshman studying entrepreneurship at the University of Utah, decided to build the calendar he wanted instead. Sonder Calendar, a voice-first calendar for iPhone, launched on the App Store in September 2026.
Instead of tapping through menus, a user says the day out loud, something like “work at 9, gym after, dinner with my mom at 7,” and the app turns it into events. Every event lands in one of seven categories, each with its own color: Work, Health, Leisure, Chores, People, Wasted Time, and Sleep and Transit.
“Most calendars are built around typing and tapping,” Lombardi said. “Sonder starts from one question: how many buttons do you have to press to make an event? With Sonder, the answer is none.”
The app also includes weekly goals, reminders, importing from Google, Outlook or iCloud calendars, a joint calendar that can be shared with one other person, and a tool called Optimize that finds open time and suggests how to use it. Sonder Calendar is free to download, with a Member subscription for the full set of features.
The colors are meant to show where time actually goes, including the parts most apps leave out. “There are no streaks and no gamification, and there is even a category for wasted time, because the point is to see your time as it really is,” Lombardi said. “Our mission is to make time visible.”
The name comes from “sonder,” a word for the realization that every person passing by is living a life as vivid and complex as one’s own.
Lombardi grew up in Rocklin, California, and came to the U because he had wanted to run his own company since he was a kid. He moved into Lassonde Studios a few weeks before the launch and is a member of the Lassonde Founders program at the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute. His peers in the program tested the app through Apple’s TestFlight before it went live.
“My peers in the program were also my beta testers, using Sonder before it launched and telling me honestly what worked and what did not, which made the app far better before anyone else saw it,” Lombardi said. A lot of the features in the app came out of conversations with other founders in the building, he said.
Sonder Calendar is the first app Lombardi has built. He taught himself to design and code it, took it through Apple’s review process, set up subscription billing, and built the company website. Days after version 1.0 went live, he shipped version 1.1, which added paid Member subscriptions, calendar importing, reminders, and a redesigned app icon.
He is now building a feature that drafts a user’s week around the open time already on the calendar. “My goal is for Sonder to be the calendar every student uses, starting here at the U and spreading to campuses across America,” Lombardi said. He plans to work on the company full time after he graduates in 2029.
Learn more about Sonder Calendar at sondercalendar.com.
