"We never use our customers' data to train third party AI models. Every data flow is designed to be auditable." This was both the opening statement of the interview and part of the pitch of Sumbios AB. The Swedish-German startup carries the intense ambition of being simultaneously a European alternative to Microsoft’s LinkedIn, as well as the 2020s version of everything LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator has ever tried (and failed) to pull off.
I spoke with the co-founder and CRO of Sumbios AI, Max (Maximilian Pangerl) on what was supposed to be a 30 minute demo and later turned out to be the opening interview for the House of European Tech. In true Germanic style, Max kept his cool even while being peppered with unscripted questions about everything, from where Sumbios is registered (Sweden, because he studied in Malmö, and because company registration in Germany remains a Wagnerian exercise similar to the Götterdämmerung). Sumbios AI positions itself as infrastructure, and even more specifically, relational infrastructure through its proprietary Symbiotic Intelligence Engine (SIE). The name is a cover for what might very well turn out to be one out of a a new generation of social media platforms, built in Europe. A good candidate for Rebuild*, even if not yet listed in their directory.
*The Rebuild movement comes with the outspoken and deliberate purpose of catering to an audience of users whose awareness of extractive practices in digital spaces is far more acute, and its risk appetite much lower than it was twenty years ago. It acts as a directory and a hub for social media platforms made in Europe, being built today.
The startup is, at the time of writing, roughly one year old and six people strong, including its three founders. Paolo Nardi Fernandez , CEO, worked at Ikea as a Digital Ethicist before Sumbios; Jonas Petter Barvé, CCO, founded his first company in the 1990s and hasn’t stopped since. Maximilian Pangerl, the third founder and CRO, has started companies in more than one continent. Stefan Wendin, Ian Nathan (former Meta) and, most recently, Kristina Graft as Founding Ecosystem and Community Partner, make up Sumbios current team.
What the founding team has in common, according to their CVs, is a shared credential from Malmö University in the areas of leadership and sustainability. The Scandinavian theme carries over in other defining concepts of the enterprise too. Trust, networks and relationships are canonical ways of describing the social codes in Swedish society and are also used abundantly to describe Sumbios, O (its software), as well as the company’s vision and ultimate purpose.
Trust to achieve what, exactly? Leveraging one’s existing network (personal and professional, in a Scandinavian context the two are one and the same) to best achieve goals many would find simultaneously aspirational and elusive. Warm intros, signal monitoring (powered by AI, of course), relationship memory are all features built to facilitate contextual access in high stakes situations. O was built for investors, CEOs, community owners and sales executives: each of these roles is heavily relationship dependent and potentially life altering at its best.
One memorable feature
Most of us have suffered the pain of trying to access contacts outside of our network on LinkedIn - by the time you've identified the key person you have in common who could actually provide an intro, you've missed your window.
And that's where O wants to shine - it does the legwork that LI once proposed to do, but never quite delivered: once a target contact has been identified, the software will identify the shortest path to it, alongside the relevant context that can facilitate that bridge, and build that warm intro. The feature that stood out to me the most when auditing O, was the ability to share your entire network. Imagine requesting and being granted consent to access someone's network as if it were actually your own!
If you’re wondering how to you'd recreate your own network from scratch in O, this is where Sumbios, at least for now, is standing on the shoulders of the LinkedIn giant: there is a documented process to import contacts from there. In the future, the goal is to provide more flexibility and allow users to import current networks from other systems, including event management, CRMs and anywhere else where a scattered network might currently be underutilized.
The moat would come from the gradual merging of networks, facilitated by the peer exchange mechanism. So while you might have had LinkedIn as the starting point, you may decide in time that it’s not worth returning to it.
Privacy by design
One word on the advanced state of awareness this startup brings to issues regarding privacy and data management: data models and systems architecture have been designed with GDPR, UK GDPR and the CCPA in mind. Data is stored exclusively in the EU, and Sumbios is currently evaluating the option of using only LLMs based in the EU. Concepts such as data portability, data ownership, the right to forget and permission-based context are actually part of the USP and are explicitly mentioned on their website.
Sumbios is not a legal tech company, but it does show a level of sophistication in leveraging legal concepts that is well above average for such a young and compact venture.
Where to go from here
Join Sumbios waitlist and try it out
Head to Rebuild’s Directory and check out the best that European SoMe companies have to offer