Mycelium
A forest is not a collection of trees. It is the living network beneath — the substrate that moves nutrients, warnings, and trust between everything that grows in it. Mycelium is that layer, for the communities you care about.
A forest is not a collection of trees.
A forest is not a collection of trees. It's the mycelium underneath — the fungal network that connects roots, moves nutrients between them, warns them of threats, and helps the whole ecosystem grow together. Biologists call it the wood wide web. Paul Stamets spent a career mapping it. Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life made the science legible.
We're building the human analog. Not the content — that's the trees. Not the tools — those are the products. The substrate that lets communities engage deeply and carry that engagement into durable, trust-weighted relationships.
A lamp, not a cigarette.
We're after increasing the relevance a sponsor holds in an audience that matters to them. That's a win-win, because it's an honest exchange. Share of mind has to be earned. It can't be bought. Mycelium merely provides the habitat — reduced friction, meritocratous opportunity, a community worth showing up for.
Traditional sponsorship sells attention-impressions that fade fast — a cigarette, burn and gone. Mycelium offers persistent salience anchored to a community graph that compounds — a lamp that keeps giving light. The mechanism is real, simple, and physical.
Three moments. One substrate.
The substrate takes shape.
Sponsor briefs, declared intent themes, the guest list takes shape. The substrate starts receiving spores before anyone walks into the room.
The hidden network fruits visibly.
Tap-to-connect on the floor. Conversations land in the graph. Sponsor content meets declared intent. Engagement becomes data.
Your presence keeps compounding.
Brokered warm intros, a Prism report, co-authored content. Your presence keeps compounding as the graph spreads through adjacent communities attendees already move through.
Three layers that feed each other.
Mycelium is an ecosystem. Three layers that compound into more than the sum of their parts. New apps in the roadmap will build on this foundation to create and capture even more value as the network grows.
kit — the tap layer.
NFC cards attendees physically carry home. Tap a card against a phone and it opens their digital profile instantly. Frictionless contact exchange means more connections get logged. kit (Keep In Touch) is our live product — 70+ active users, micro-piloted at 3 prior events. Mycelium rides on it.
Mycelium — the graph layer.
The persistent community substrate. Tell us the niches you want to reach and the graph surfaces matches from members who've declared intent there. It's the precision targeting that makes social-graph ad platforms work, without the impression treadmill. Need something custom? srvo has you covered.
Prism — the attention layer.
The bloom's shareable record: community announcements, talk recaps, topics that resonated, conversation keywords. Prism captures what's meant to be shared and compiles it into your post-event sponsor report. What analytics have you always wanted but couldn't reach before? Tell us — Prism can surface them.
The spores spread beyond one event.
You've seen sponsor menus — an email blast, a monthly newsletter blurb, a product-launch evening. Those are moments of attention in one room. Mycelium operates on another level. Partner with the bloom, and your presence keeps moving.
Attendees are also in AI, higher education, startups, robotics, music, fine arts, fashion, and nightlife. Mycelium's graph follows them. Your sponsored content, brokered intros, and curated corpus cross-pollinate into the adjacent communities those members already move through.
Strategic positioning. Community alignment. Reach that compounds.
The connective tissue between communities.
Mycelium doesn't extend a single community — it links many. The network already spans Hardware Meetup, NY Robotics, South Park Commons, Fractal Tech, Newlab, Industry City, and adjacent technical circles.
The people in those rooms already cross into the arts, nightlife, music, fashion, and education scenes. Your sponsored presence follows them to new frontiers.
What communities are on your radar?
We'll get you a seat at the table.
Plant a spore. Share the harvest.
Five depths of relationship with the substrate — from a first presence in the bloom to branded roots running through every event in the year. Each tier is the previous with deeper roots. Start anywhere; grow from there.
| Feature | Spore | Contributor | Partner Anchor tier | Deep Partner | Substrate Partner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand listing | In event corpus | Co-branded recap | Featured placement | Named chapter in tree | Sub-corpus you own |
| Service offering | — | 1, discoverable | 1 + featured | Priority matching | Curated, branded |
| Brokered intros | — | 1 | 3 | Unlimited in targeting | Unlimited × every bloom |
| Card branding | Mycelium cards | Co-branded · up to 150 | Premium sponsor · up to 250 | Custom finishes · up to 400 | Unlimited custom |
| Content | Recap inclusion | Co-branded recap | Sponsored corpus | Co-authored piece | Branded sub-corpus + speaking |
| Engagement report | Aggregate | Aggregate | Formal + segmented | Formal + segmented | Per-bloom formal |
| Strategic access | — | — | — | Quarterly call | Roadmap input + early access |
| Best for | Smaller companies testing Mycelium. Early validation with minimal commitment. A presence commitment, not a marketing campaign. | Companies with a clear product or service to surface. Mid-level commitment, qualified connections coming out of the event. | Companies that want real community presence and want to replace traditional swag with functional branded hardware. The anchor tier most sponsors start from. | Companies serious about community presence and growth. Top-of-menu for a single-bloom commitment. | Companies with long-term commitment to the community. The Mycelium-native equivalent of the year-long sponsor slots — roots running through every bloom. |
The cyber-physical printing press.
Cards aren't just contact cards. They're pamphlets, flyers, lookbooks — artistic printing that doubles as a tap into the substrate. Brands have constant printing needs. Mycelium becomes the press: upload your artwork, or design with us, and we print, encode, and ship.
Cards land at every event your brand touches — not just the meetups Mycelium runs. Each card is a spore in the world, pulling new users into the graph and growing your footprint with every tap. The consumable scales the revenue model. The printing is the product.
Talk to us about your campaign printing.
Stale content gets new life in the graph.
Most sponsor content dies on a corporate site nobody visits. Mycelium inverts that — your content lives in the graph, annotated and recommended by people who actually engaged with it at real events.
We invert the LinkedIn model: instead of brands aggregating content into a feed, brands distribute content to a network of users who annotate, endorse, and contextualize it where it matters. Information affiliate marketing. A new kind of brand ambassador — one who actually showed up. Stack Exchange for the people you actually met.
The graph remembers who recommended what, and to whom.
People · Places · Content · Conversations.
Every person you meet is a node. Every event you attend is a node. Every piece of content surfaced is a node. Every conversation that produced a recommendation is an edge.
The graph remembers context — not just "who knows whom" but "who met where, working on what, after a conversation about which idea." Trust isn't a follower count. It's a weighted edge anchored to a real moment. The substrate keeps the moment alive long after the room empties.
A walkable substrate.
Imagine searching for "people who attended the last bloom and declared intent in robotics" — and getting a list ordered by trust-weighted recency. Or "content recommended by trusted organizers in the last quarter."
The graph is queryable, navigable, and accountable. Sponsors don't get a dashboard of impressions. They get a tool.
Today's cards are tomorrow's apps.
Every card you put in the world is a launching point. As the footprint grows, new apps can be deferred until the audience tells you what to build. We're already building srvo apps — Carte Blanche, and others not yet named — that ride on top of any sponsor's footprint.
The cards are the spores. The apps are the bloom that follows. You're not paying for one event's marketing. You're claiming real estate in a substrate that compounds into product surface area.
Become a sponsor.
Answering the obvious questions first.
How do I know what the harvest is actually worth?
Why NFC cards instead of QR codes?
What happens to the NFC cards after the event?
What if an attendee doesn't have NFC enabled on their phone?
What if the bloom under-performs?
Can I target specific kinds of attendees?
What happens to my presence after the 30-day harvest window?
Is my engagement data private?
What counts as a "brokered introduction"?
Can I bring my own content into the bloom?
What's the commitment timeline?
Can I upgrade tiers mid-year?
How does Mycelium prevent spam or low-quality sponsors?
How does Mycelium relate to the hardware meetup's existing sponsorship menu?
Plant a spore. Share in the harvest.
Mycelium is an early, opinionated, vision-driven bet on a specific idea — that the connection layer underneath communities is where the most durable value lives. Founding Partners are coming in early, holding fair pilot rates, and helping shape how the substrate grows.
If you're the kind of company that wants to be part of the thing from the beginning, not the kind that waits for everything to be proven — this is the moment.