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 soft drink brand, which she describes as low-glycemic, has finished a successful real-world pilot and is heading toward commercial production. Her foundation, Set & Setting, is unambiguous about who it serves and why. It builds safe third spaces for LGBT+ youth and other young people who need alternatives, and it takes direct aim at anti-intellectualism through life-building workshops in financial literacy, art, science, world religions and philosophies, healthy nutrition and more. These are her stated values, and she’d rather they draw the aligned and repel everyone else. She’s also finishing an original music and film project that turns love and loss into art, and there’s more beyond that for anyone who goes looking.
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 on finding love, worn out by the competitiveness and rat-race mindset of everyone she kept meeting, 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. She frames everything she makes now as a tribute to him. The soda is dedicated to him, and so is the song. Every project carries the same dedication, to the rare person who lifted her up when others tried to keep her down.
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. She says the disappointment ran deep enough that she once planned to change her surname to Tofana, after Aqua Tofana. Meeting the man she loved changed that too. She’s now in the process of officially taking his surname instead, a name she already uses as her art pseudonym.
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. She says she trained as a therapist working through art and nature, and she treats that practice as the engine behind everything she makes.
This is where the self-made label falls away, though not in the way it usually does. Ask Maria Sosin Bachórz where the credit belongs and she’ll point outward as much as inward. “I am a manifestation of influential people who shaped me throughout my life,” she says, and she means it as gratitude, not modesty. But she’s clear that carrying those influences forward is her own work. The painful choices are hers. So are the sacrifices, and the discipline of actually building the things she sets her mind to. She credits the people who shaped her and still owns the effort it takes to honor them. It’s a strange stance for a founder heading into a capital raise, where the usual move is to project singular vision, and she’s betting that holding both at once 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.
