Company site
Refinery
Refinery turns stranded power into sovereign AI compute, and Symbai Studios designed and built the site that explains how.
SYMBAI Studios
AI Studio for Planetary Flourishing
Websites, apps, tools and automations for small businesses that do good.
Accepting new clients
What are you dreaming of creating?
Tell us in a sentence. In about two minutes you get a sketch of what we would build, a price range and a direct line to Samuel.
Or start from any of these
AI can change what a business is capable of. We help people who already do good work put it to use.
That might mean more sales, a website people actually find, or a week with far less admin in it. We work with neighborhood businesses, founders and independent makers, and we start from wherever you are today.
What we do
End-to-End AI Transformation
We work with
- Local businesses
- Entrepreneurs
- Creative professionals
- Mission-driven organizations
- 01Strategy & DiscoveryWe start by listening. We look at how your business runs day to day, find where AI would save you the most time or bring in the most work, and write a plan you can follow without us.
- 02Custom AI SystemsAssistants, agents and automations built around the way your business already works. We set them up with your own language, processes and standards, so the work they do sounds like you.
- 03AI-Native Digital PresenceWebsites and apps that look beautiful and do real work for you. They can answer visitors' questions, keep your content fresh, and show your brand at its best.
- 04Training & GrowthHands-on workshops and coaching in plain language, so your team can use AI tools with confidence on their own. Over time you should need us less.
Not sure which of these you need? The two-minute quiz sorts it out and gives you a price range.
Selected work
All 10 projects are live, so you can open any of them now. Gaia AI, the work we are proudest of, is under contract with Regen Network and has presented at the United Nations.
AI lab
Symbiocene
The frontier AI lab develops intelligence that observes, investigates and learns with the living world.
Software product
Unfurl
Symbai Studios designed and built Unfurl's site and software with Paris.
Research lab
Gaia AI
Gaia AI is building one system that reads satellite, trade and registry data, reasons across it and shows the evidence behind every answer.
Material atlas
Overshoot
The planetary atlas traces where materials come from, how they move and where they go once we are done with them.
Community
gAIas
gAIas is a Signal group for people building with AI, and its site runs the member directory and a nightly digest of the chat.
Browser extension
NOOG
The Chrome extension swaps porn, gambling promos and rage bait in your feed for cats, nature and quiet.
More from the studio
Starry BodiesAstrology siteSamu's astrology site makes free tropical and sidereal birth charts in the browser, and adds astrocartography maps and private readings.starry.samu.quest 
MateadaCommunityA member-supported culture hub on Salt Spring Island uses this site to gather its founding hosts.mateada.symbai.studio 
Cosmic ConferenceEventEarth's interdimensional delegates meet at Entelechy on Salt Spring Island this Halloween, and the site plays it straight as a 2003 conference portal.cosmic.symbai.studio
Our ventures
Intelligence at Scale
What we believe
Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, should serve the flourishing of all life, and we build every system with that in mind from the first line of code.
Common questions
Questions We Get Asked
What is Symbai Studios?
Symbai Studios builds websites, apps, tools and automations for small businesses that do good, including local businesses, founders, nonprofits and creators. Samuel Barnes founded the studio in 2026 and works from Brooklyn, New York and Vancouver, British Columbia. Its live work includes the site for Mateada, a member-supported culture hub on Salt Spring Island, the Gaia AI research lab and the Overshoot material atlas. Symbai Studios has no connection to symbai.dev or symbai.tech, which happen to share the name.
How much does a small business website cost at Symbai Studios?
A small business website from Symbai Studios usually costs $3,000 to $8,000 CAD and takes 2 to 4 weeks. Workflow automations cost $2,000 to $6,000, AI assistants $5,000 to $15,000, and apps or software products $15,000 to $45,000. Team workshops run $800 to $3,500, and a strategy and discovery session costs $600 to $1,500. The quiz at symbai.studio/start gives a range for your own project in about two minutes, and Samuel Barnes confirms a fixed quote after a first call.
Do I own what Symbai Studios builds?
Yes. Symbai Studios clients own the code, the tests and documentation written so their own team, another developer or an AI agent can pick the work up cold. The studio takes on a small number of projects at a time, so you work with Samuel Barnes directly, and build work arrives in weekly increments.
Where is Symbai Studios based?
Symbai Studios works from Brooklyn, New York and Vancouver, British Columbia, and builds for small businesses across British Columbia, the rest of Canada and the United States. You can book a 30-minute intro call with Samuel Barnes at cal.com/symbai/intro-call or write to hello@symbai.studio.
How does Symbai Studios stop an AI tool from making mistakes?
Symbai Studios writes the rules into the code instead of relying on review, because an AI 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 throw out any AI-sourced field that arrives without a real source URL, monthly spend ledgers with protected per-region floors, and kill switches the automation cannot reach.
What is generative engine optimization?
Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of getting content cited by AI systems such as Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude, as opposed to ranked by traditional search engines. These systems retrieve and cite individual paragraphs, so a self-contained answer with a specific number and a clear attribution does better than a long keyword-optimized article. Samuel Barnes of Symbai Studios published SPECTER, an MIT-licensed skill graph of 43 nodes in five clusters. It teaches an AI agent to monitor citation gaps, gather intelligence, write content, publish it, and check whether the citation appeared.
Let's talk
Start a Conversation
Tell us where you are and where you want to go. The questions here take about two minutes, and Samuel reads every answer himself.
Or reach us directly
hello@symbai.studioStep 1 of 6
What are you dreaming of creating?
Or start from any of these
There's no sign-up, and Samuel reads every brief himself.