Our story
Intelligence built in service of life.
The world’s most important infrastructure is human: the networks and relationships that everything else moves through. We are three founders who arrived at that conclusion from three different directions, building the memory those networks never had.
01
One of us grew up moving. Across countries, cultures, and languages, learning what connects human beings when everything else falls away. Living as an immigrant teaches you something no business school does: the walls between people are rarely natural. They are structural, built into the systems we inherited. And beneath them, what people want is simple. To connect, to create, to contribute, to belong.
If the walls are structural, the fix has to be structural too.
02
One of us has spent over 40 years building AI. Not for efficiency. Not for automation. For unity. For the belief, held since the beginning, that intelligence, built with care, could help human beings find each other across the distances that divide them.
Eight of those years went into memory, which is the hardest problem in the field and the least glamorous. Not intelligence that answers faster. Intelligence that remembers what mattered, and why.
A system that forgets people cannot serve them.
03
One of us has spent a career inside organizations. Leadership, transformation, sustainability, and the work of navigating what comes next, across ventures in Europe and the United States. Boardrooms, restructurings, the long work of change. The lesson repeated every time: strategy does not move an organization. Relationships do. The org chart is the map. The trust between people is the territory.
The most valuable thing in any system is never the nodes.
It is the relationships between them.
Three different journeys. The same conclusion.
The systems we inherited, the organizations, the tools, the platforms, were built on a single logic. Collect the data. Lock it down. Monetize the access. Extract the attention. In that model your network is a product, your relationships are inventory, and your trust is a surface to be exploited.
We do not accept that.
So we made three decisions.
The structure
Sumbios is steward-owned. Purpose holds the controlling vote, not capital, which means no one here holds the power to sell what you hold. Most companies promise not to sell your data. A promise lasts until the incentive changes. We removed the incentive.
The product
We are not building a better CRM. We are building the layer underneath it: a network relationship memory that consolidates every source, makes sense of the fragments, reveals what was hidden, and lets trust move between people with permission. The category did not exist, so we named it.
The stance
O shows you. You decide who to call. It never sends messages as you, never acts in your name, and never scores a human being. AI that points you back at people, not away from them.
What everyone told us.
We spoke to the people whose network is their business. Investors losing warm paths they had earned years ago. Revenue leaders walking into first calls with no context. Ecosystem builders whose network is their single most valuable asset, with no system to match. Advisors whose word is their product, holding two decades of trust in their head and a notes app.
What struck us was not the volume of the frustration. It was how unanimous it was. Every one of them had built something priceless, and not one of them could see it whole.
What we refuse.
No advertising model. There is no feed here, and no business model that would reward one.
No data sale. Not as a promise. As a structure: under steward-ownership, no one holds the power to sell it.
No messages sent as you. O never acts in your name, and never scores a human being.
Then others recognized it.
The diagnosis did not stay with three people.
One of us scaled Facebook’s nonprofit fundraising integrations from two million dollars a year to a hundred million, then left after a decade in tech to build communities and steward-led companies. He saw the attention machine from the inside, and he saw what actually moved that number. Not the feed. Partnerships. Relationships with people, built one at a time, held in his own head because no system held them for him. Raised in community, he has spent his whole life on one question: how do humans coordinate at the speed of trust?
One of us had spent fifteen years across fintech, venture ecosystems, decentralized technologies, and impact innovation, running Startupbootcamp FinTech in Dubai and partnerships at Tech Nation, matching founders to investors and ideas to resources. The matching was never in a database. It was memory, intuition, and a private map that lived in one person and disappeared when they left the room. She has spent her career on what comes next: what a network becomes when trusted relationships turn into collective intelligence.
Different rooms. The same missing infrastructure.
Nobody here joined for a job. Everyone here arrived with the same mission, from a different door. This is the team.
Paolo, Ian, Kristina, Stefan, Petter. Malmö, Sweden.
Founders
Paolo Nardi
Co-founder and CEO
Technical founder working at the intersection of systems thinking, network intelligence, AI, and change management. Former Digital Ethicist at IKEA, building ethical AI frameworks and knowledge graph applications across global operations. Deeply versed in how relationships and networks shape access, opportunity, and outcomes.
Stefan Welcker
Co-founder and CTO
Global AI leader with more than 30 years building enterprise AI platforms across EMEA, North America, and APAC. Rebuilt a $450M AI operation from 45 percent to 96 percent accuracy and scaled engineering teams from 1 to 125. Eight years building memory systems, which is the hardest part of what O does.
Jonas Petter Barve
Co-founder and CCO
More than 30 years in leadership, entrepreneurship, and organizational transformation, including leading and developing multimillion-dollar ventures across Europe and the United States. Engagements include The Yellowstone Club, Lightsphere AI, Airbus America, Oatly AB, Business Sweden, SIDA, Emory University, SEE Learning, and Malmö University. MSc Leadership for Sustainability, Malmö University.
Founding team
Kristina Graf
Founding Partner
Founding Partner leading ecosystem growth, strategic partnerships, and community. More than 15 years across fintech, venture ecosystems, decentralized technologies, and impact-driven innovation. Led Startupbootcamp FinTech in Dubai, built partnerships at Tech Nation UK, co-founded ValuesCo, and has advised founders and investors on fundraising, growth, and ecosystem strategy. Passionate about the future of human collaboration, she is helping define the emerging category of network relationship memory, enabling people and organizations to transform trusted relationships into collective intelligence.
Ian Nathan
Founding GTM and Partnerships Partner
Scaled Facebook’s nonprofit fundraising integrations from $2M to $100M a year, then left after a decade in tech to build communities and steward-led companies. Today he leads partnerships at Sumbios, helping founders and investors turn their network into their net worth. Raised in community, he has spent his whole life on one question: how do humans coordinate at the speed of trust?
Advisors
Stefan Wendin
Board Advisor
Head of Intelligent Systems at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. Spent five years at Neo4j scaling the company through enterprise growth, ecosystem development, and global commercialization. Led AI Sweden’s largest MLOps program across more than 20 enterprises.
Every opportunity is already one connection away.
We built Sumbios O for people whose network is their business.
If that is you, we would like to meet you properly.