Porto-based Sybilion has raised a $4.2 million seed round, co-led by VentureFriends and Semapa Next, following a $600K pre-seed raised months earlier backed by Vanagon Ventures and EWOR. The round also included support from Spanish VC fund GoHub Ventures.
The new capital will accelerate the company’s AI-powered decision platform, which links external market signals to a manufacturer’s internal exposures, so teams can act earlier and protect margin.
Manufacturers routinely make billion-euro choices using spreadsheets, delayed reports, and gut calls. When markets swing, a few weeks of mistimed procurement or hedging can erase millions from the bottom line.
Sybilion’s system continuously filters more than one trillion external risk factors, from freight rates and electricity futures to port congestion and weather, and maps the ones that actually move a company’s costs and revenues.
Instead of another forecast number, the platform surfaces the specific signals that matter for a given product, plant or region, and frames realistic options with quantified trade-offs.
From Academic Research to Industrial Application
The company grew from academic work on decision-making under uncertainty and practical experience in volatile markets. Founder Bjol R. Frenkenberger studied these problems at Oxford and saw the gap between available data and timely alignment inside firms.
Alongside co-founders Nuno Barros, Jonas Falknerm and Friedrich Weninger, he built a system that connects external dynamics directly to procurement, sales and finance workflows.
“Industrial companies do not lack data,” explained Bjol. “They lack clarity about which signals truly matter and when to commit. Our goal is to give decision-makers the information advantage so they can turn external world dynamics into confident action before uncertainty becomes cost.”
Early commercial use cases show the approach works. K.D. Feddersen used Sybilion to align purchasing against global polymer flows; Jobachem integrated energy futures and commodity signals to set procurement boundaries; Maral Overseas applied forward trade-flow analysis to adjust export allocation by region.
Over the last year, Sybilion reached high six-figure recurring revenue, with zero churn and no dedicated sales team, a marker of tangible value to customers.
What’s Next for Sybilion After its Seed Round
Sybilion’s next steps focus on deepening integrations so recommendations land inside existing systems and teams can act without friction.
Planned upgrades will move the product from delivering signals to facilitating strategic planning under uncertainty, essentially structuring the decision moment itself. That means clearer scenarios, prioritised options and operational checklists that shorten the time between signal and commitment.
By helping procurement, operations, and leadership commit earlier, and with shared confidence, the platform aims to convert volatility from a liability into a competitive edge.
In the long term, Sybilion intends to apply the same approach to other fragmented, high-risk supply chains where late alignment costs real money. It sits at a practical intersection: data abundance meets time scarcity. Its decision architecture does not replace core systems, but augments them, turning disparate inputs into coordinated action.
For heavy industries where windows to lock in price, capacity or supply are shrinking, that difference can be the margin between profit and loss.
Insights from Investors
“Industrial companies are being forced to make larger decisions on shorter timelines as volatility becomes the norm. We’re excited to support Bjol and the team as they become the decision layer for manufacturing,” said Apostolos Apostolakis, Founding Partner at VentureFriends.
Grégoire Viat, Principal at Semapa Next, commented: “We were impressed by what Bjol and the team at Sybilion have built in a short period of time. Sybilion delivers clear, measurable value to industrial customers, addressing a fundamental need for decision confidence amid an increasingly volatile supply chain. We are pleased to support the founders as a long-term partner as they continue to scale the business.”
“Bjol is one of the most fascinating founders I’ve been fortunate enough to meet. He is a piano prodigy, a builder, an academic, a leader,” said Daniel Dippold, CEO and Founder of EWOR. “With Sybilion, he managed to build the largest dataset of time-series data I have seen to date and orchestrates it in a way that gives industrial teams a decision advantage no one else can offer. Similar to Bjol, Sybilion is one of a kind. Their technology is built like a musical masterpiece, they are growing fast, and Bjol has assembled a unique team that would have never come together were it not for his leadership.”
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