About
Who We Are
Symbai Studios is a small AI studio run by Samuel Barnes. We build websites, assistants and automations that make good businesses easier to find and easier to run, and we have a great time doing it.
We split our time between Brooklyn and Vancouver. We take a few projects at a time, so you work with Samuel directly, as hands-on or hands-off as you like. Every project on this site is live, so go click around.
What we believe
Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, should serve the flourishing of all life. We put that belief into the architecture of what we build, where it has to hold up every day.
Clarity
We explain what we built and why, in language you can take straight to your board.
Craft
We build the limits first. Spend ceilings, source requirements, and kill switches go in before any features do.
Regeneration
You get code, tests, and documentation you own outright, and the work keeps paying off after we leave.
Who does the work
Samuel Barnes
Founder & Principal
Samuel is Head of Growth at Refinery, co-founder of Symbiocene, and founder of Gaia AI, and he holds an MPA from Columbia. He sets the architecture, writes the specs, and reviews everything an agent ships.
Track record
Where This Came From
Refinery
Head of Growth
Samuel leads growth, brand, and agentic engineering for a stealth AI micro-data-center company.
Symbiocene
Co-founder
Symbiocene is a frontier AI lab developing intelligence that observes, investigates, and learns with the living world.
Gaia AI
Founder
Gaia AI is a research lab building an ecological superintelligence layer. Its first live instrument is Overshoot, a planetary atlas of material flows. The lab is under contract with Regen Network and has presented at the United Nations. Samuel counts it as his proudest work.
Power Finance
Head of Growth
Power Finance makes a yield-bearing synthetic dollar backed by the US electricity market, positioned as a currency for agent-to-agent payments.
Daylight Energy
Head of Marketing
Samuel ran growth and campaigns for a virtual power plant network built on distributed energy hardware.
Worldcoin
Head of Community
Samuel reported to Sam Altman, grew the Discord from 5,000 to 50,000 and the X account past 200,000, and ran signup events in Berlin, New York, and Tokyo.
In production
Live Work
Get in touch
Start a Project
Tell us about your business and where you want to take it next, whether that is the website, the offering, or the platform behind it.