Dear Chairman » Peder Prahl

As your family office, Bolero, holds a substantial position in Cint Group AB, I thought it advisable to reach out regarding matters I believe are material omissions that may impact your thesis on Cint’s future. In alignment with my prior advice, Brett Schnittlich appears to have been removed as COO on February 4^th, 2026.

There is much more to do to restore Cint’s value for shareholders.

While I doubt you would increase your position, given the 30% mandatory offer trigger, we are market researchers, and it is in my nature to study market risks and opportunities.

The Domestique

Lucid’s first-mover advantage catapulted the company to the forefront of quantitative sampling. Following its first survey complete by Memolink in 2010, the company grew rapidly under the guidance of co-founder Walton Comer, whom Patrick has described as the “brains of the operation”. While Patrick remained involved, the primary challenge became scaling the business as quickly as possible. Now that Cint has entered a new chapter following the merger, there is little evidence to suggest Patrick retains the capacity to execute at the level required.

Great hail! we cry to the Comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;

Likewise, Walton has effectively left the industry. He now operates a Bermuda-licensed crypto firm and has associated himself with Alex Mashinsky, who famously pleaded guilty to commodities and securities fraud in connection with the $4.7 billion judgment against Celsius Network. ¹

Prior to Lucid, the P2Sample acquisition also brought exceptional talent into the C-suite. Yet through cultural clashes and a rapid executive turnover, few visionaries remain whose priority is Cint’s long-term success. This must change.

Placera reports that Cint has experienced “a disastrous development”, a characterization Patrick reportedly joked about in response. With the share price down 94.71% over five years, there is little to laugh about. Pressure is now mounting with new short positions from Two Sigma ² and Winton Capital. ³

One could argue that, as a first mover, Cint overextended itself through debt and financing, effectively sacrificing its balance sheet to build the industry that competitors now benefit from.

Rising Tide

One misstep during Lucid’s growth was the distribution of equity and the lack of long-term alignment. While the company achieved a unicorn-level acquisition, many early employees were left with little to no capital participation. Oftentimes, those employees have moved on to start or be involved with direct competitors of Cint. As severance packages and non-disclosure periods are expiring, Cint continues to lose any foothold in an evolving landscape.

While Patrick seeks to project seniority and leadership within the industry, his actions during Lucid Holdings, LLC v. Wallace appear capricious. Fearful and defenseless as fast-followers surpass a first-mover commodity business, his behaviors indicate the awareness that Lucid, and now Cint, have no clear moat.

Today, former employees, suppliers, and even buyers are increasingly turning away from the platform. Rather than accept Cint’s gargantuan margins, many are investing capital to build their own infrastructure and bypass the exchange entirely.

As Cint evaluates its long-term incentive program going forward, it should reassess its leadership structure and ensure that those guiding the company are fully aligned with shareholder interests.

Granose Flakes

Recently, a troubling pattern has emerged as paid user acquisition has been siphoning respondents away from the incentivized survey ecosystem. Cint has little control over the work posted to its platform. Unvetted buyers overwhelm suppliers and can recruit respondents into other external services, while the company lacks adequate systems to control, monitor, or meaningfully inspect what is being offered. If the company cannot effectively govern the basic work currently flowing through its platform, it raises questions about its ability to manage more complex initiatives.

Cint has repeatedly failed to fully leverage its supplier workforce. After the acquisition of Lucid, Cint never recognized that its core asset is the paid attention of respondents performing ephemeral tasks. Rather than building systems that productize and deploy this workforce across new categories of human-in-the-loop work, the company has stagnated and allowed this workforce to remain confined to traditional survey workflows.

This lack of execution is not new. While at Lucid, employees recall a meeting in which Scale AI wanted to explore the use of Lucid’s large supplier ecosystem to support its Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback program. It would have been a perfect pairing; however, under Patrick’s leadership the meeting ultimately fumbled and no working relationship was solidified. Only a few years later, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14 billion. In fast-moving markets, early actors must secure strategic initiatives and control scarce resources before fast followers do.

As shown by Phil Ahad, Cint is now attempting to reposition itself in a world where large language models can already generate many of the insights that consumer brands once relied on human panels to produce, particularly when real-time or novel discovery is not required. Today, the company’s stated goal is to connect human data with advanced AI, machine learning, synthetic data, and digital twin capabilities. Given the company’s track record, the adults in the room must raise serious questions about execution, governance, and liability. As a Swedish entity, Cint would potentially pass large volumes of respondent data to third-party processors, or at minimum to Databricks infrastructure located outside the European Economic Area. This raises fundamental questions about both regulatory exposure and the long-term stewardship of respondent data.

Alesia Braga and John Brackett have failed in their roles to guide the company’s technology divisions, and are years behind schedule on the platform unification process. Likewise, little new technology or innovation have emerged justifying the description “Research Technology Leader”.

India, In Demand

After years of working with Cint’s talented Indian employees and monitoring the company’s recruitment postings, I wanted to better understand the capabilities and market differentiators of its Gurugram- and Mumbai-based teams. To do so, I booked the next flight to India and checked into The Oberoi, ready to buy people lunch and ask questions. In Market Research, this is known as an intercept survey.

The fieldwork was briefly disrupted after I became violently ill from a chicken burrito at California Burrito Mexican Kitchen in Cint’s downstairs lobby.

It quickly became clear that Cint’s Indian team members are the lifeblood of the company: a Westernized façade built atop a vast but under-appreciated workforce abroad. During my time there, a major structural risk became obvious. As shown in the map below, the red star shows Cint office, while the other two blue stars mark large competitors in the market research industry. In many ways, Good Earth Business Bay in Gurugram is the heart of the ResTech industry, but it is also a hub of constant employee movement and information flow.

Cint has little capacity to protect its intellectual property, buyer relationships, or customer-support strategies when its talent pool naturally looks toward one another, rather than forming loyalty to a public Swedish company, largely controlled by private equity money (no offense).

More C-level leadership should be stationed full-time in the Indian office to align culture and enthusiasm. Today, Cint functions largely as an outsourced consultancy while being marketed as an innovative market-research technology platform.

Cint funds Malware Distribution and Survey Fraud tools.

The supplier IPRoyal FZE LLC integrated with Cint on June 10^th, 2022. IPRoyal is an ISP (AS209043) that also operates Karolio IT paslaugos, UAB (AS211440), both owned and operated by CEO Karolis Toleikis. Within the panel community, the company may be better known through its product Pawns.app, marketed as “Start earning right away with surveys.”

Security researchers at Paris Nanterre University prominently featured the company in a logiciels malveillants (malware) case study. ⁴ The firm has also appeared in cryptojacking campaigns ⁵ and researchers have documented how associated malware strains are distributed through adware channels. ⁶ It is unclear why Cint would expose its user base to such infrastructure, particularly when many buyers rely on Cint to measure advertising campaigns. Either Cint’s supplier oversight committee has failed in its due diligence, or the company assumes its enterprise clients will not notice.

Researchers at the Actionable Threat Intelligence Platform have further documented dropper-type infection vectors used to distribute proxyware installations tied to the network ⁷.

According to Spur, IPRoyal’s proxy service is currently the beneficiary of IP address blocks originating from several Ukrainian ISPs profiled in a Kentik report. ⁷

The report referenced by Krebs on Security was authored by Doug Madory, an Internet routing infrastructure expert, who detailed the Russification and proxy hijacking of Ukrainian IP blocks originating from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions ⁸. These events are tied to the ongoing conflict surrounding the Battle of Kherson and the Siege of Mariupol, where an estimated 88,000 civilians were executed by invading Russian forces ⁹.

Ukrainian ISPs face severe operational hardship. In some cases, they lease portions of their IPv4 address space through brokers in order to generate revenue. Following several RIPE NCC policy decisions, a market for IPv4 leasing has emerged, with brokers facilitating monthly leases of IPv4 address blocks to other networks. One of the most prominent brokers was founded in 2021, just one year before IPRoyal joined Cint.

These arrangements allow companies such as IPRoyal to obtain large pools of residential-appearing IP addresses, to which they can attach arbitrary metadata and network attribution.

In fact, one of the address ranges had been registered as “AT&T Services, Inc.” in a likely attempt to use it for a residential proxy. […] I brought this to a contact at AT&T and within a few weeks it was gone. ¹¹

The point stands: IP identity on the Internet is increasingly fluid. Geolocation feeds, ASN metadata, and organizational attribution are all subject to manipulation.

🇱🇹 Karolis & Mindaugas: mano tautiečiai, I would have shared my grandmother’s Kugelis. 🇱🇹

The U.S. Department of Justice recently prosecuted two individuals involved in the creation and operation of a residential proxy network ¹¹. Similarly, Google published a report last month detailing the takedown of another large residential proxy infrastructure ¹².

I was recently in Cebu City investigating an unrelated matter, when I got back home and tried to watch Mukbang videos on Youtube, I was bombarded with IPRoyal ads for how to save on proxies. It seems as though Pawns predominately focuses its advertising in English-speaking markets outside the United States.

The last time I dug into IPRoyal Pawns, you would get extra bandwidth for completing surveys. A contemporary Ouroboros! I just checked their website today and it looks like they’re now focused on having a single respondent take 10 surveys a day. They also openly instruct their users on how to take surveys with their proxy service.

Four years after IPRoyal joined Cint’s supply network, it is difficult to understand how these issues remain unaddressed. The SVP of Supply would almost certainly be aware of the situation. I had an epiphany! It was perfectly explained to them and multiple employees acknowledged the risk.

Icarus, of course, ignored the warning.

I followed up directly to confirm they’re still working together and that Cint is paying them on time. Cint also provides an API that allows you to List Suppliers.

As of today there have been approximately 144,459 surveys created in the past week on Cint for respondents in the United States, while the Philippines only has 1,531. The delta is even greater when you account for the United Kingdom, Canada, and other predominantly English speaking countries.

This disparity is also reflected in Cint’s own marketing materials, which claim 77 million completed U.S. surveys compared with roughly 1 million in the Philippines.

Goodhart’s Ruler

A primary function of a Market Research exchange is to ensure a diverse pool of respondents. Supplier concentration creates a fragile ecosystem in which a single supplier can exert material influence over the exchange. This risk is typically mitigated by working with a broad range of suppliers that employ different recruitment and engagement techniques.

Cint may argue that its exposure to IPRoyal is insignificant. However, shareholders have limited visibility into this risk due to ongoing reductions in organizational transparency. One example is the removal of the previously public supplier quality report.

Thankfully, Cint publicly discloses certain security tools used on its platform, and we can verify their presence when accessing the Cint respondent environment. It’s unclear why DataDome is the only “Banning/Unbanning” processor listed as a sub-supplier, particularly as it does not appear to be referenced on the Samplicio.us platform.

Cint appears to have entered an agreement with one of its security vendors that permitted the publication of supplier-volume data in a report released late last year. The report is sorted by supplier volume levels, so it reveals that IPRoyal accounts for more traffic than 98.6% of suppliers, falling into the top 10 suppliers by volume. It is reasonable to assume most, if not all, of this data is being provided by Cint.

General Research has independently verified that this security tool is unable to detect the type of residential proxies provided by IPRoyal.

Sexy Gaming: Pragmatic Play

As early as January 2025, a real-time Cint streaming service appeared to promote an Indonesian online gambling site featuring baccarat alongside scantily clad women. I initially dismissed this as a technical oversight, but the incident was ongoing for over a year and raises an obvious question: how could this occur within a production environment?

Emails to Patrick requesting contact information for submitting bug reports and technical issues have gone unanswered.

If you’ve found any of this helping to guide your Fundamental Analysis, please feel free to send a gift basket of Djungelvrål or Sallos Schwarzweich Salmiak to:

Max Nanis
540 Mariposa Ave,
Mountain View, CA 94041
United States of America

With peace of love,
Max Nanis