98%

SUM INNOVATION INC

Utility backed infrastructure for the 98% who think blockchain is a scam

FOUR TECHNICAL FOUNDERS  ·  100% FOUNDER OWNED  ·  RAISING $2M PRE SEED
THE PROBLEM

A blockchain publishes everything and forgives nothing.

DEFECT ONE

Everything is public

A public ledger has no notion of a private object shared with a chosen few. The options are publish it, or encrypt it and hand somebody the entire key. There is nothing in between, so nobody puts anything that matters on chain.

DEFECT TWO

One lost key erases you

Self custody has no recovery path. Lose the device and the identity, the records and the credentials are gone permanently. Ordinary users will not accept that risk, and no institution can underwrite it.

Privacy and usability. Not scams, not throughput. These are the two reasons the technology works and almost nobody uses it.
HOW PEOPLE COPE TODAY

Every workaround moves the failure somewhere else. None of them removes it.

Encrypt it and share the key

The standard workaround for privacy. It is all or nothing: the moment you share, the recipient can pass it on forever and you cannot revoke.

Seed phrases and hardware wallets

The standard workaround for recovery. It moves the failure from the software to a piece of paper in a drawer, and the failure is still total.

Social recovery wallets

Recovery bolted on above the protocol, so it stays optional. Optional recovery is no recovery, and no institution will underwrite an optional guarantee.

Give up and use a centralized platform

What almost everyone actually does. It restores privacy controls and password resets by handing one company the ability to read, alter or lose everything.

THE WHAT IF

What if a chain could keep a secret, and forgive a mistake?

What if a private file could be opened by exactly three named people and nobody else; what if losing your phone did not mean losing your name, your records and every credential you ever earned; and what if neither of those required the user to know a blockchain was involved at all.

The Solution

We built the full stack. Every layer. From scratch.

OmniNode Demo: click here Demos saved on SNIP — decentralized, verifiable & permanent.
THE VISION

Four pieces at the protocol level. The last one is only possible because of the other three.

1

Compute and storage become subprotocols

Both move to the protocol level, so consensus prices a transaction by the future AI utility it creates rather than by gas alone. The chain pays for useful work instead of block space.

2

Storage gains a friend class

Borrowed from C++. An owner grants named parties scoped read access to a private encrypted object without ever surrendering the key.

SOLVES PRIVACY
3

Institutions mint certified records

Credentials and records are issued on chain by the institution itself, turning issuance into a graph of verified relationships rather than a pile of documents.

4

Proof of Social Networking

Multi party computation over that graph reconstructs a lost private key from the institutions and people who already vouched for you.

SOLVES USABILITY
Step four needs storage and identity running simultaneously at consensus. No chain is built that way today.
TRACTION

Live on mainnet in eight months, on roughly $100 a month, before anyone funded us.

1 + 2 + 1 + 1
one protocol, two subprotocols, one user facing product layer and one open source deep learning framework (RUMUS)
$100
total monthly burn across the entire company
$0
outside capital raised; 100% founder owned
300+
GitHub stars for RUMUS, plus 300 crates.io downloads, with zero marketing
32
first time blockchain users onboarded at UCLA on day one
Top 5
globally for OmniNode at AI Tinkerers LA
WHY WE WIN

Four different bets. Every one of them breaks in the same place.

0G Labs

Bets a compute marketplace produces correctness. With no slashing, a wrong answer costs the provider nothing, so correctness stays a preference. Their wall is economic.

IPFS and Filecoin

Bet that storage and access control are separable. Without protocol level permissioning, sharing still means handing over the whole key. Their wall is architectural.

Transcrypt

Bet that verifiable credentials could be made usable above the chain, then recentralized the moment usability mattered. Their wall is custodial.

Every L1 with a privacy layer

Treats privacy as an opt in module rather than a consensus rule, so it protects only the applications that bother to use it. Their wall is coverage.

TIMING

The window is open. It won't stay open.

Centralized storage kept failing at scale

MOVEit, National Public Data and PowerSchool all broke the same way, exposing 1.7 billion records in 2024 alone. The workaround everyone actually uses, handing one company everything, is the one that keeps failing.

Passkeys reset what users will accept

Apple, Google and Microsoft put recoverable keys in front of a billion people. After that, an unrecoverable seed phrase reads as indefensible rather than merely inconvenient.

Consumer silicon crossed the cost line

Apple Silicon and consumer GPUs reached the point where distributed inference costs less than renting cloud capacity, which makes a compute subprotocol economically real instead of theoretical.

Capital rotated back to infrastructure

a16z Crypto closed a $2.2B fund aimed at turning crypto infrastructure into everyday products, and infrastructure is now the dominant pre-seed deal type.

The window is open because the components exist and nobody has assembled them at the protocol layer. We already run the storage layer and the identity layer.
Team

The only team that can build this. Here's why.

LLeonard

Leonard

CEO · AI · Blockchain · Systems

RUMUS — Rust-native deep learning framework, written solo. UCLA Math/CS. Alpha Speedrun: 100% coding assessment.

MMichael

Michael

COO · Infra · Platform · Security

NASA lunar mission telemetry published in SPIE. DARPA-backed AML subgraph matching engine in C++. Architected SNIP from zero. Shipped SUMaillet to Chrome Web Store.

CCaleb

Caleb

CPO · Math · Product · Analytics

Univ. of Delaware Applied Math PhD candidate. Proved OmniNode model-sharding architecture. Shipped Graduate Journey — live product for underserved first-gen and international students.

SShayan

Shayan

CSO · Statistics · Networks · Go-To-Market

Columbia University MA Statistics. Validated mathematical foundations across SUM protocols. Columbia alumni network as GTM leverage.

Academic Advisors

Prof. Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA) · Prof. Paolo Climaco (UCLA) — Co-directed Leonard & Michael's graph-matching research (signed MATH 199). Foundational to SUM Chain consensus layer.

SUM Innovation Inc

$2M to take SUM from internal ecosystem to market.

What we're raising and what we need beyond capital:

$1M
50%
Infrastructure & Engineering

Validators and Archive Nodes to secure SUM Chain and serve SNIP at scale; core engineering to harden every layer.

$300K
15%
GTM

School and institution deployments for SUMail — travel, installation, on-site onboarding.

$250K
12.5%
Business & Marketing

Marketing and sales experts to form GTM, build pipeline, and reach institutions.

$200K
10%
Legal & Patents

Patent filings across SUM Chain, SNIP, OmniNode, SUMail — plus IP and corporate counsel.

$250K
12.5%
Runway Buffer

Multi-month operating stability through the next milestone.

Beyond capital, we need: Expert GTM operators · Partnership intros · Recruiting pipeline · Demo Day distribution · Network access
ONE MORE THING

You do not have to take our word for any of it.

SUMaillet is in public beta on TestFlight right now. Install it, create an identity, and send an encrypted message that settles on our own L1. Everything described in this deck is either running in that app or running underneath it.

SUMAILLET PUBLIC BETA
testflight.apple.com/join/zydrd8ZY
Point a camera at the code
SUM
SUM Innovation Inc

Get in touch.

Leonard — CEO
leo@suminnovation.xyz
SUM Chain:EoK8yhHUpKfybhb1K59C9KDT6BibTDyPP
Michael — COO
michael@suminnovation.xyz
SUM Chain:MMwxCo6U35xubBLi6N3ouktKiT7FM2gFE
Caleb — CPO
Khalebean@suminnovation.xyz
SUM Chain:2Ehi3aBAtV2bSoN1pPNDbxBKsFSxWrrDQ
Shayan — CSO
shayan@suminnovation.xyz
SUM Chain:4PanYCkhwtJvMxm2mJyzqyqmq9q9bDEtQ
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