The 35-year-old CEO finds it ideal to have her workspace right in the middle of the university campus and the chance to interact with students and professors. For nearly a year now, she and her co-founder, Gabor Farkasch, have been fine-tuning a unique app: With xounds, users will soon be able to record and share stories, podcasts, and sounds related to intimacy and sexuality in a protected space.
The idea for this came only after many years and various career stops. It has always been important to her “to bring about social change and help shape society,” Steinbock says. Demonstrations against the Iraq war were a matter of course during her school days in Berlin, and she wanted to delve deeper into political science, which she had taken as a high school graduation subject, at university. “Being political is not an option but our right and our opportunity in a democracy.”
In 2009, she began studying political science and public law at the University of Potsdam. She swapped her second subject for business administration and went to Ireland on an Erasmus scholarship to improve her English. “Ireland was the better choice over Great Britain. In the political science courses, there was a lot of discussion about the Northern Ireland conflict.”
After completing her bachelor’s degree, she worked as a student assistant at the Bundestag. Then she returned to the University of Limerick for a short master’s program in “European Politics”: “The Irish connection remained.” After a job at a human rights organization, she took on a parental leave replacement position at the Irish Embassy in Berlin – and then ended up in London at “Tourism Ireland,” the government tourism agency for the island of Ireland. “There I spent two years learning about marketing.”
An experience that qualified her for a job as an administrative assistant for economic affairs – again at the Irish Embassy in Berlin. This time, she was responsible for relations between Germany and Ireland, the EU, agriculture, tourism, and technology. “That’s how I got into the tech industry in 2017.” She focused on artificial intelligence in Germany. “I realized that white men train AI with specific content, which in turn reproduces that bias. I found this very intriguing.”
The final impulse for xounds came from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Afterward, she attended a sex-positive party with a good friend, despite her initial reservations, and was impressed by how respectfully people treated each other there. “The rules that you only approach someone with mutual consent had been set beforehand, and a team was on site for education, prevention, and mutual care.”
This experience sparked the idea of creating a digital space where people could live out sexual fantasies differently and consensually – “specifically for those who aren’t well-represented right now and have struggled to represent themselves, such as women over 40, queer people, or real couples.” Pornography is mostly made for men, and erotic literature isn’t for everyone’s taste. “We wanted to find a low-threshold way for everyone to share stories, reflections, conversations, and sounds in a safe and controlled way.”
With financial support from the Berlin Start-up Grant, Steinbock and her co-founder created a flyer featuring a logo and their concept. “We got feedback from about 100 people at Christopher Street Day in Berlin,” she explains. “Women in particular thought it was cool that they could use their voices to share something anonymously or just listen.”
An app for erotic audios: That touches on a taboo. She was all the more delighted that she, along with her co-founder and a data engineer, was able to present the prototype at the Potsdam Transfer startup center. “We pitched for ten minutes.” The technologically innovative project sparked interest: Potsdam Transfer helped with the application for the EXIST Start-up Grant, and a few weeks later, they received approval.
xounds was founded in April 2025; since then, a freelance manager and interns have been coming and going in the office. The new app is already available for download, and more than 500 early users have participated in the process. Now the technology needs to be refined and the AI further trained. The AI is designed to verify that the voices of people who upload their audio and consent forms match and to check the content for discrimination.
The young company is therefore currently applying for additional funding from EXIST. That would mean another year without free weekends, Steinbock says. “A startup is an incredible amount of work. You really have to want that.”
This article appeared in the university magazine Portal - Eins 2026 „Inklusion“.