37 | Frederik / Interhuman AI: Building the Machine That Could Replace His Mother's Career

Frederik Sally is trying to teach machines to read the parts of a conversation that never make it into words: the hesitation before an answer, the confidence behind a claim, the nervous energy under a smile. If he and his team succeed, one of the first careers their technology could make obsolete is his own mother's. She has spent her life running a communication consultancy and writing books on how people talk to each other. Frederik tells her as much, and she jokes that he might just put her out of a job. He isn't sure the two things are connected. He suspects it's more coincidence than inheritance. But it's hard to ignore that he also has a grandfather still launching ventures at almost 90 and a biological father who ran one of Denmark's first commercial radio stations. Something in the family clearly likes building things other people said couldn't be built.

That instinct led him and two co-founders, Paula Petcu and Line Clemmensen, to found Interhuman AI, a Copenhagen startup building what Frederik calls a "social intelligence layer" for AI. The idea didn't start where it is now. It began as a therapist app, failed to find buyers, and pivoted hard once the founders noticed that companies were far more interested in the underlying technology than in the product itself. That pivot has since raised a €2 million pre-seed round, and Interhuman AI is now betting on sales training and user research as the use cases that prove the technology works before the bigger, harder problems (cultural nuance, healthcare, therapy) are ready to tackle.

Whatever stage you're building at, this conversation will land somewhere familiar: being early to a market that isn't ready yet, discovering your actual business by watching what customers ask for instead of what you set out to sell, and using story and branding to buy yourself time while the technology catches up.

🔑 In this episode, we talk about:

What Interhuman AI's "social intelligence layer" actually reads (tone, hesitation, confidence, body language) and why today's LLMs miss all of it

Growing up in a family of entrepreneurs: a grandfather still starting companies near 90, a mother who built a career teaching communication, and a biological father who ran early commercial radio in Denmark

The pivot from a failed therapist app to licensing the underlying tech to sales-training and user-research platforms

Raising a €2 million pre-seed round, and why deep tech is a harder sell to European investors than American ones