Onono: Swiss AI startup with Austrian founders secures six-figure investment
The Swiss AI startup Onono, which has two Vienna founders in Kaiyue Li and Marko Göls, has secured a high six-figure angel investment. The young company develops autonomous cognitive AI. The goal is to free the AI industry from “Frozen Intelligence” by building a proprietary operating system for cognition.
“We break through current AI limits”
“With the world’s first ‘Progressive AI,’ we break through current AI limits,” says the Onono founder team around CEO Kaiyue Li and Chief Business Officer (CBO) Marko Göls. The two developed their idea and vision during their joint collaboration, which has already lasted three years. Göls was previously CEO of the Vienna creative agency Digitalsunray. Li was formerly Lead AI Architect there.
During their joint development of complex multi-agent systems, the two identified hard limitations of current generative AI. With Onono, they want to overcome these. To do this, they are developing a “digital subject,” an autonomous AI that operates within a continuous cognitive loop.
Onono combats “Frozen Intelligence”
“This AI doesn’t just compute. Based on biological principles such as autopoiesis (self-creation) and swarm intelligence, it develops a continuous understanding of events, time, causality, and itself—and continuously improves further, independently or in collaboration with humans. This represents a breakthrough into a new form of cognitive autonomy: the AI rewrites, adapts, and expands its own world model through constant interaction,” explain the two founders.
With its technology, Onono wants to solve the problem of current massive but ultimately static models of “Frozen Intelligence” on the market today. According to the startup, conventional intelligence systems become rigid after their training, suffer from memory gaps, systemic degradation and hallucinations, and wait passively as reactive tools for prompts. Onono’s cognitive AI is intended to break through these limitations.
Startup develops “Cognitive Consulting Model”
“Our vision is deeply rooted in the concept of ‘Viennese digital humanism,’ and we place strong emphasis on European values,” say Li and Göls. The interdisciplinary team brings together philosophy, mathematics, business, art, and engineering. To optimally position the startup for international deep-tech investors, the founders registered Onono AI AG in Zurich. This way, they want to guarantee uncompromising alignment with data security and regulatory stability.
With the fresh capital, Onono wants to advance the development of its architecture. A central focus is on the novel “Cognitive Consulting Model.” The system acts like a senior partner at a top consulting firm. To relieve enterprise customers of concerns about losing data sovereignty, Onono creates an architecture that technologically decouples the customer’s fact structures (Project Semantic Net) from the AI’s learned solution logic and intuition (Cognitive Personality Net). The customer retains absolute data sovereignty while the digital subject simultaneously builds a smart, co-learning knowledge architecture.
