Trust Tech Ventures (TTV) is a new venture capital fund focused on “trust tech” and trustworthy AI, aiming to look credible to institutional investors and deeply relatable to researcher–founders at the very earliest stages. They needed a visual identity that clearly differentiated them from generic, “stuffy” VC brands, while avoiding the cliché climate–NGO aesthetic that many trust‑adjacent brands fall into.

At the time of the project, the fund was pre-launch with no real brand assets beyond a holding page and an in-progress pitch deck, yet branding was a critical lever for closing their initial anchor LPs and attracting a pipeline of founders in an emerging, not-yet-clearly-defined category.

Without a clear and distinctive visual identity, TTV risked blending into a broad field of early-stage European funds that talk about “AI” in general, but do not specialise in trust tech or offer genuinely hands-on support to founders. Their founders had spent a decade in trustworthy AI, but this depth of expertise and their differentiated thesis were not yet legible at a glance in their materials.

There was also a strategic tension inside the brief: TTV wanted to feel expert, determined and wry, “in the kitchen having an in-depth conversation, Negroni in hand,” while still coming across as modern, precise and premium. Early creative explorations risked either feeling too abstract and “design-y” (raising questions about credibility for institutional LPs) or too natural/NGO-adjacent (diluting the sharp, technical edge of their thesis).

To resolve this, the project focused on developing a brand system anchored in “emerging precision in nature”: visuals that evoke trust, groundedness and natural systems, but rendered with the clarity and structure needed for institutional audiences. Two initial directions were explored—one more warm and abstract, the other more natural and grounded—and then merged to retain the grain, gradients and emergent forms of Direction 1 while leaning into the precision and trust vibe of Direction 2.