Grow on the go. Branding for companies that are still being built.

How we work with founders of AI, SaaS and fintech startups, from the first raise to Series A.

(01)

The difference

Big brands protect. Startups have to prove.

A global brand's biggest risk is losing what it already has, so the agency process built around it is careful by design: months of research, stakeholder interviews, committees, review rounds, and a brand book handed over to an in-house team. Our team learned that process at Landor and BBDO. It works for the brands it was built for.

A startup has nothing to protect yet and everything to prove. The brand has to convince a few dozen people who matter right now: the partners at the next fund, the first enterprise buyer, the senior engineer weighing two offers. And it has to be ready by the date on your calendar.

	Agency playbook	How we work with startups
At stake	Equity built over decades	Belief earned in weeks
Audience	Millions of consumers	A few dozen investors, buyers and hires
Timeline	Set by the agency's process	Set by your raise or launch
The product	Finished and stable	Changes every sprint
Who runs the brand	A brand team and a roster of agencies	Founders and a small team, often without a designer
Deliverable	A brand book	A working system: deck, website, product UI, templates
Who you talk to	An account manager	The people doing the work, in your Slack
Success looks like	Awareness and consistency	A closed round, a signed pilot, an accepted offer

(02)

Why it matters

A product nobody understands fails like a product nobody needs. It just takes longer.

In March 2026, CB Insights looked at 431 venture-backed startups that shut down since 2023. 70% ran out of capital, which the report calls "almost always the final cause of death, not the root problem." 43% never found product-market fit.

A brand can't create demand that isn't there. But between a good product and the money it needs to survive sits a question the brand does answer: do the right people understand what you are, fast enough to act on it?

70%

of venture-backed startups that shut down since 2023 ran out of capital.

CB Insights, 2026

<3 min

is how long investors spend on a pitch deck. Decks that raised held them for over four minutes, decks that didn't for about ninety seconds.

DocSend

5%

of B2B buyers are in the market at any given time. The other 95% buy later, from the companies they remember.

LinkedIn B2B Institute, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

The window is short. Your deck, your homepage open in the next tab and the name an investor types into search all compete for those few minutes. Enterprise buyers move on a longer clock, and when they are finally ready, they start with the companies they already know.

The concept of 'leave a trail of playful web annotations' was too abstruse for the bulk of folks to take up.

GameLayers, from a startup post-mortem collected by CB Insights

(03)

Brand as an operating system

Not a brand book. An operating system.

Metabrand doesn't just create brands. It gives you an operating system to scale.

Rene Bystron, DeltaGen

In a startup, the brand is the set of decisions that lets a team of ten act like one company without asking the founder every time: what we say first, what we never say, how we look in a deck, on a trade-show booth, inside the product. It has to hold up under pressure, in a partner meeting or a security review, and it has to survive the next pivot.

So every system we build has four layers, from the one that should never change to the ones that change every week.

WebsitePitch deckSales deckProduct UILaunch filmSocialEvents

GridTypeColor with a jobMotionIconsUI tokens

For investorsFor buyersFor hires

The idea“Infrastructure, not an AI tool.”

Example idea: Vanadio, AI for metal distributors

Layer 1

The idea

One sentence the whole company can repeat. For Vanadio, which sells AI to metal distributors, it was “Infrastructure, not an AI tool.” For Qorelo, which automates SAP migrations, “Capacity, not replacement.” Every case on our site carries one, as its Meta* Idea.

Layer 2

The narrative

The idea turned into an argument that works the same way in a pitch, on a homepage and in a sales call, for investors, buyers and future hires.

Layer 3

The system

An identity built from parts that combine: grid, type, color with a job, motion, icons, deck templates, UI tokens. Vanadio's is drawn from the spreadsheet cell, the unit every metal trader already works in.

Layer 4

The surfaces

Website, decks, product screens, launch film, social. They change constantly, and your team can run them without us.

When the product pivots, the surfaces change and the system flexes. The idea usually holds. If it doesn't, you need a new positioning sprint, not a new brand from scratch.

(04)

How a project runs

Planned backwards from your next milestone.

We don't sell packages. Every project starts from a date: a round, a launch, a conference, a first enterprise pilot. We scope the work on a short intro call, confirm it as a fixed quote and plan the sprints backwards from that date.

Sprint 01

PositionIdea, narrative, name

Sprint 02

IdentityThe visual system

Sprint 03

WebsiteDesigned and built

Sprint 04

LaunchDecks, film, social

Your dateRound, launch, pilot

KickoffPlanned from right to left

01

Position

Interviews with founders and customers, a close read of how competitors position themselves, and the questions investors keep asking. The result is the idea, the narrative and, when needed, a name.

02

Identity

The idea becomes a visual system. We test it on the surfaces you will actually use, a deck slide, a homepage, a product screen, a LinkedIn post, from the first round of concepts.

03

Website

Designed and built by the same team, so nothing gets lost in a handoff. Structured around what investors, buyers and candidates each need to see, and easy for your team to update without developers.

04

Launch

Pitch and sales decks, one-pagers, a social kit, a launch film. We stay on call on launch day.

From 3–4 weeks for a focused identity

From $15K for identity

From $25K for identity and website

How we work together

In your Slack

Async by default, with a clear weekly cadence and overlapping hours across US and EU time zones.

In Figma, in the open

You see the work as it develops, so there is no big reveal to dread at the end.

With founders

We present to the people who make the call, so feedback doesn't get diluted on its way to us.

One senior team

The people who lead the strategy design and build the work. No junior handoffs, no outsourcing.

(05)

In practice

Three founders, three deadlines.

Qorelo, SAP migration AI, Berlin

A launch date and no brand.

A young company selling AI into SAP programs run by Accenture, Deloitte and SAP itself, to buyers who have watched vendors overpromise for two decades. We built the brand on throughput rather than substitution, so Qorelo stays sellable through the consultancies that deliver those programs. Qorelo closed a $3.5M seed round in June 2026, five months after it was founded.

We had a launch date and no brand. Less than a month later we had a brand and a website, and the team was on call day and night so nothing broke.
Louis Schmidlin, Qorelo

View case →

Vanadio, industrial AI, Berlin

AI for an industry that distrusts AI.

Metal distributors run their revenue on systems they have used for decades. A typical AI-startup look would read as an experiment, so we positioned Vanadio as infrastructure and drew the identity from the spreadsheet cell. The same cells run through the product, the icons, the decks and a website in English and German.

Our customers run on email, PDFs and spreadsheets. Metabrand built the whole identity on a spreadsheet cell, and for the first time our brand looked like it belonged in their world.
Simon Zühlke, Vanadio

View case →

DeltaGen, sales intelligence, US

After the Series A.

DeltaGen tells B2B sales teams why they win and lose deals. We worked with the team in sprints after their Series A and took the identity and the website through as one process, so the heatmap lens, the message and the product story launched together. The system now runs through decks, demos, events and the product interface.

View case →

Grow on the go. Branding for companies that are still being built.

Big brands protect. Startups have to prove.

A product nobody understands fails like a product nobody needs. It just takes longer.

Not a brand book. An operating system.

The idea

The narrative

The system

The surfaces

Planned backwards from your next milestone.

Position

Identity

Website

Launch

How we work together

In your Slack

In Figma, in the open

With founders

One senior team

Three founders, three deadlines.

A launch date and no brand.

AI for an industry that distrusts AI.

After the Series A.

When we're not the right partner.

Let’s discuss your project!