Sommo is a wine intelligence company, and a company of one. I built it, I run it, and I am the only person on it: product, AI, apps, backend, infrastructure, model fine-tuning and hosting, on-device inference, marketing, content, ads, revenue ops, partnerships, support, press, and acquisition.
Revenue reached $200k in the first year.
Sommo AI
At the core is an LLM I trained on wine-specific data and refine every week, grounded in a wine database I maintain by hand. The grounding is the whole point. No invented vintages, no confident nonsense about producers that do not exist, no generic answers you could get from any chatbot. I think it is the best wine AI in the world, and I have yet to meet one that sits closer to the ground truth.
Two posts cover how it was initiated:
- Building a Sommelier in a Weekend, on fine-tuning a 7B model into a wine expert.
- Teaching Sommo to Reason, on adding a knowledge graph so recommendations follow relationships instead of vibes.
The reasoning side is shaped directly by the knowledge graph work I conducted at the University of Oxford. I built a wine knowledge graph there as a controlled test of whether grounding a language model in structured knowledge pays off at scale: Datalog rules and ComplEx embeddings, measured against the model on its own. It cut invented wineries by 3.5x. That result is why a graph sits in Sommo’s roadmap rather than staying an academic exercise. The paper and the code are both public.
The same engine is being extended into on-device LLM SDKs, so wine intelligence can run on the hardware in your hand rather than sending every query to the cloud.
Sommo App
Sommo AI powers native apps on iOS and Android, with HarmonyOS next, localised into nine languages. Interface, WSET study content, and request-time AI writing all arrive in the user’s own language rather than translated after the fact.
The app brings together what a wine lover or collector actually needs:
- Label scanning
- A tasting journal
- A multi-rack cellar with meal pairing
- Full WSET Levels 1 to 4 preparation
- Palate insights
- An interactive region map
It is a B2C business with thousands of users and a community that shapes the roadmap directly.
For businesses
The wine-tuned model, the knowledge graph, and the device-local SDKs are available to companies that want accurate wine AI inside their own products. That covers partner and affiliate programmes for educators, creators, and sommeliers, and licensing for businesses such as restaurants.
Company of one
Inspired by Paul Jarvis’s Company of One, I optimise for profitability, sustainability, and retention rather than hyper-growth. Staying small is a decision rather than a constraint: it keeps the product and the community ahead of everything else.
Recent
- First international independent developer to proactively join HarmonyOS, presenting Sommo at Huawei Developer Conference 2026 (Sina News).
- Guest on the Sip with Nikki podcast.