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Symbai

SYMBAI

AI Studio for Planetary Flourishing

We build AI systems trusted to run unattended. With real money, on real infrastructure, for real people.

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We build top-shelf AI systems for organizations dedicated to planetary flourishing.

Bring us yours and we will get it running. We take what you cannot get built and ship it as working software, widen the reach it earns you, cut what your operations cost to run, and grow what they return. The evidence is on this site, and most of it you can open.

What we do

Four Ways We Get You There

01

Strategy & Discovery

You leave knowing exactly where AI pays off in your business, what it costs, and what to build first. We watch how you actually operate, score every opportunity against effort, and hand you the list, including what to skip.

02

Custom AI Systems

You get the system you have been describing for a year, built and running. That means agents that handle a job end to end, pipelines that enrich your data without inventing any of it, and guardrails solid enough that you stop watching it.

03

AI-Native Digital Presence

More of the right people find you, and they find you first. We build sites that load fast, convert, and get cited by AI search, where a growing share of your buyers now start.

04

Training & Growth

Your team ships with these tools instead of debating whether to. We train on your codebase and your workflows, then stay on call while the habits stick. Your team owns it after we leave.

We work with

Climate & energy · Mission-driven organizations · Founders building something that matters

Selected work

Shipped and Running

Every one of these runs in production. The public ones are linked.

Applied AI

Refinery Atlas

Finding the megawatts that are already on the grid

building footprints ingested
466,689

building footprints ingested

scored candidate sites
9,686

scored candidate sites

Agentic Systems

Unfurl

A research-to-execution loop that gates every step

commits
1,324

commits

test suites
290

test suites

Applied AI

ChatHRT

Hormone therapy management that never phones home

platforms, one shared core
2

platforms, one shared core

domain tests
34

domain tests

Platform & Open Source

SPECTER

An open-source agent for getting cited by AI search

skill-graph nodes
43

skill-graph nodes

capability clusters
5

capability clusters

See the work
Refinery Atlas: scored stranded-power candidate sites across the ERCOT grid, with transmission lines and substations

Our ventures

Intelligence at Scale

Gaia AI

Planetary intelligence for environmental stewardship

Refinery

Compute sited on power that already exists

Symbiocene Labs

Compliance architecture for regenerative enterprise

Initiatives

Encyclopedia of Regeneration

A living knowledge base for the regenerative movement

Visit

The Gaian Times

News and analysis for planetary stewardship

Visit

Common questions

Questions We Get Asked

What is Symbai Studios?

Symbai Studios is an AI studio founded by Samuel Barnes that builds top-shelf AI systems for organizations dedicated to planetary flourishing, working from Brooklyn, New York and Vancouver, British Columbia. It works primarily with climate, energy, and mission-driven organizations. Its public work includes Refinery Atlas, a stranded-power and grid-intelligence pipeline across two US ISOs; an open-source GHG Protocol calculator shipping 967 emission factors; ChatHRT, a hormone therapy app that keeps medical data on the device; SPECTER, an open-source agent for generative engine optimization; Paredes AI; and THRESHOLD. Symbai Studios is a separate organization from symbai.dev and symbai.tech, which share the name but have no connection to it.

How do you stop an AI agent from shipping something wrong?

Symbai Studios enforces constraints mechanically rather than relying on review, because an agent will not hold a convention across a long session. In practice that means architecture gates that reject a commit and name the rule it broke, servers that discard any AI-sourced field arriving without a real source URL, monthly spend ledgers with protected per-region floors, and kill switches the automation cannot reach. On the trading system Symbai maintains, a self-run adversarial audit of the execution path found six critical and four high-severity money-path defects, all of which were fixed before that code handled capital again.

How do you keep a language model from fabricating data in a pipeline?

Drop the field server-side unless it arrives carrying a verifiable source URL, rather than asking the model not to fabricate in a prompt. Symbai Studios applies this rule in Refinery Atlas, where an enrichment agent researches property owners and contacts across 9,686 scored candidate sites: any owner name, phone number, or email that does not come back with a real citation is discarded before it reaches the database. A site with no verifiable owner displays no owner. Zero unsourced contact fields have shipped.

How do you tell whether a trading backtest is real?

Apply a Deflated Sharpe Ratio gate, which adjusts the significance threshold for how many configurations were tried and therefore exposes selection noise that a raw Sharpe ratio hides. When Symbai Studios ran this gate across a full parameter sweep of 981 candidate configurations on its Unfurl trading system, 3 survived. The other 978 were overfitting that produced attractive equity curves. Any strategy that fails the gate is barred from holding capital regardless of how its backtest looks.

What is generative engine optimization?

Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of getting content cited by AI systems such as Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude rather than ranked by traditional search engines. The unit of retrieval is the paragraph rather than the page, so a self-contained answer carrying a specific number and a clear attribution outperforms a long keyword-optimized article. Samuel Barnes of Symbai Studios published SPECTER, an MIT-licensed 43-node skill graph across five clusters that teaches an AI agent to monitor citation gaps, acquire intelligence, generate content, publish it, and verify whether the citation appeared.

What does it cost to work with Symbai Studios?

Engagements start with a fixed-fee diagnostic from $5,000, which returns a ranked roadmap and an honest list of what not to build, then move to build work delivered in weekly increments. Symbai Studios takes on a small number of projects at a time. You own the code, the tests, and documentation written so your own team or your next agent can pick it up cold. Contact hello@symbai.studio or book a call at calendly.com/starrybodies.

What we believe

Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, should serve the flourishing of all life. We build that in rather than put it on a wall.

Start here

Tell Us What You Are Building

Tell us where you want to take it. You get a straight answer on what it takes, what it costs, and how fast.

Or reach us directly

hello@symbai.studio