The Polish multidisciplinary founder and artist Maria Sosin Bachórz is building what she calls an international ecosystem, one that stretches across business, art, music, design and social impact. She doesn’t see these as separate ventures so much as projects that feed one another, sharing a creative language and a set of values. And the pieces are actually moving, not just talked about. M.L. Soda™, her low-glycemic soft drink brand, has finished a successful real-world pilot and is heading toward commercial production. Her foundation, Set & Setting, runs social-impact work around belonging, dignity and healthier environments for young people. She’s also finishing an original music and film project that turns love and loss into art.
What ties all of it together isn’t an industry category. It’s a set of standards, and they sharpened after loss. She’d given up by the time she met the man she loved, a biotechnology student who believed in her ideas and encouraged her to build them. His death changed the urgency of everything. Rather than letting grief shrink her world, she decided to expand it, to build and contribute as fully as she could. She even started singing again after years of silence, something she’d stopped doing when people close to her dismissed her talents. That encouragement still shapes her work, including her stage presence, which uses a hologram she describes as both a strategic and a personal part of how she performs.
There’s a harder edge to her story that she wants on the record. Bachórz says she was raised, in a patriarchal culture, to become a wife, and that she walked away from a series of relationships with successful men because staying would have meant making herself smaller and giving up her own work. She walks away from everything misaligned, because she has her own definition of success. As a saying in her mother tongue puts it, not all that glitters is gold.
Now she’s preparing for a pre-seed raise, expanding her international media presence, and looking for investors and institutions who see the same connective logic she does. Trained as a therapist working through art and nature, she treats that practice as the engine behind everything she makes.
This is where the self-made label falls away. Ask Maria Sosin Bachórz where the credit belongs and she’ll push it away from herself. “I am a manifestation of influential people who shaped me throughout my life,” she says. Every time she creates, she treats it as a way of celebrating their talents rather than claiming the win alone. It’s a strange stance for a founder heading into a capital raise, where the usual move is to project singular vision. She’s betting that being honest about her influences reads as strength, not weakness.
The line she keeps returning to sounds like a mission statement, except she actually seems to mean it: life is worth protecting, celebrating and using well. You can follow her work on TikTok, through her writing on Medium, or at Set & Setting.
