Sybilion seeks to help manufacturers confidently address volatility

Sybilion, headquartered in Porto, Portugal, has announced a $4.2 million seed round to build what it calls a decision layer designed to give industrial companies the ability to act earlier and protect margins in volatile markets. The round was co-led by VentureFriends and Semapa Next and comes just months after the company’s $600,000 preseed round that was co-led by Vanagon Ventures and EWOR. 

According to the company, most manufacturers have access to historical data feeds, analyst reports and internal forecasts but still struggle in determining which risk factors actually matter. Procurement, sales and finance can work from different inputs and reach different conclusions. By the time alignment happens, markets have moved and margins are diminished. Sybilion says the bottleneck is rarely access to information but the confidence to commit before the window closes.

Sybilion says its system identifies which signals materially affect a company’s exposure and links them directly to cost structures and product portfolios. Rather than delivering another isolated forecast number, Sybilion says it structures the decision moment itself, clarifying realistic options, trade-offs and quantified risk boundaries so companies can commit earlier. Its platform continuously filters more than 1 trillion external risk factors, including weather anomalies, trade flows, freight rates, electricity futures, commodity prices, port congestion, industrial utilization and macroeconomic indicators. 

“Industrial companies do not lack data,” Sybilion co-founder and CEO Bjol R. Frenkenberger says. “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.”

Frenkenberger pursued his doctorate at the University of Oxford, studying how businesses make decisions under uncertainty. During his research in April 2021, he observed how industrial companies struggled to translate abundant external world dynamics into timely, aligned action. He co-founded Subilion with  Nuno Barros, Jonas Falkner, Friedrich Weninger to build a decision architecture that connects the external world directly to operational choices inside manufacturing.

“Industrial companies are being forced to make larger decisions on shorter timelines as volatility becomes the norm,” says Apostolos Apostolakis, founding partner at VentureFriends, which is based in Greece. “We’re excited to support Bjol and the team as they become the decision layer for manufacturing.”

A number of companies have been working with Sybilion, including K.D. Feddersen, an international distributor of engineering plastics, which used the technology to align earlier on critical pricing and purchase decisions around global polymer trade flows and feedstock dynamics. At Jobachem, the platform enabled timely commitment with integrated energy futures and upstream commodity signals to frame procurement decisions with quantified risk boundaries. For Maral Overseas, forward trade flow analysis made it possible to take informed export allocation decisions by identifying regions where demand was strengthening.

“Sybilion delivers clear, measurable value to industrial customers, addressing a fundamental need for decision confidence in an increasingly volatile supply chain environment," says Grégoire Viat, principal at Lisbon-based Semapa Next. "We are pleased to support the founders as a long-term partner as they continue to scale the business.”

Sybilion says it plans to deepen its mapping from external signals to product-level exposure and decision recommendations, broaden “Sybilion Connect” integrations so actions land directly inside client workflows and expand from insight delivery into agentic planning support that helps teams determine the next best move under uncertainty. The long-term goal is to give industrial decision-makers an advantage that compounds, turning uncertainty from a threat into an edge.

“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," Daniel Dippold, CEO and founder of Berlin-based EWOR, says of Frenkenberger.