Naming, positioning and identity for a data intelligence platform serving VCs, accelerators and technology transfer offices — plus the first brand book, MVP product mockups, an investor deck, a landing page and a complete brand.json.
Brand infrastructure for startups
Senior creative direction paired with AI production. We build your Brand Brain — positioning, identity, an investor deck and a landing page, in three weeks, in a form your team and your AI tools can run.
Who it's for
Built for companies that move fast and get judged fast.
We work with high-growth tech startups from pre-seed to scale-ups.
Pre-seed
You are about to raise
You need a deck, a site and an identity that make a real company out of a real idea — before the first investor meeting.
Seed
You have a product to sell
Shifting from a raw prototype to a commercial product that enterprise buyers trust.
Scale-up
You are growing faster than your brand
Content demand outruns the team. You need output every week without hiring a department to make it.
If you already know exactly what your brand should be and only need hands, a design subscription will serve you better and cost less.
The problem we solve
Good design doesn't say you have taste. It says you're ready to grow.
Brand is the layer founders treat as optional — until the raise opens, demo day hits, or an enterprise buyer asks for a deck. In a few-minute window, investors aren't evaluating your typography. They are using your visual legibility as a proxy for your operational competence. When your brand looks like a placeholder, stakeholders assume your tech is one too.
0%
of people judging whether a company is credible cite its visual design first — ahead of the actual content.
Stanford Web Credibility Project0:00
Average time spent on decks from companies that failed to raise.
DocSend, via TechCrunch"I could recognise the same Gamma templates across different companies."
Vestbee, on pitch decks in the AI era, 2026What it looks like now
- The deck was built in Google Slides the night before
- The site says less than the LinkedIn page
- Three team members export three different logo files
- Every asset takes a week because no rules exist
- AI tools produce off-brand output because there is nothing to feed them
- The brand looks earlier-stage than the company actually is
What changes
- A deck that survives a four-minute read
- A site that matches the ambition of the round
- One system, one source, no version drift
- New assets in hours, not weeks
- AI output that is on-brand by default
- A company that looks like it is going somewhere
The offer
Productized brand sprints for every stage.
Most companies start at Brand Brain and grow into the next one.
Pre-seed
Brand Brain
3 weeks · fixed scope
Your Brand Brain, built in three weeks: positioning, identity, pitch deck, landing page and founder materials.
Seed
Product
Fixed-scope project
Brand turned into a selling machine: product identity, landing pages, sales decks and campaign systems.
Growth
Scale
Monthly retainer
Founder-led content, video, podcasts and a producer on call — visibility without a hire.
Deliverables
What's in your Brand Brain.
Most agencies hand over a static PDF. We deliver a system — design assets paired with executable data structures.
01Brand
02Materials
03The brand brain
The brand brain
We don't hand you a file. We hand you a system.
Brand.pdf sits in a folder. Brand.json runs like your company's brain. The old brand book was something people opened when they remembered it existed. This one gets read every time a tool writes a post, builds a slide, or answers a question about what your company does.
AI-native is the new default. Your company is already being described by models, whether or not you gave them anything to work from. The question is what they find when they look.
brand-brain/
├── brand.md positioning, the one-liner, the story
├── voice.md principles, and the words you never use
├── identity.md colour, type, logo rules
├── audience.md who it's for, what they do instead
├── prompts.md copy, image, deck
└── brand.json tokens, machine-readable
Your brand system built to be operated in Claude.
An AI-native company keeps its judgement in a brand brain and lets everything else run against it. That is what lets a small team produce like a large one, and what stops the work drifting as the volume goes up.
The work
Built for ambitious, performance-driven founders.
Why Zepnie
Agency-level thinking. Startup pace. Startup price.
The people who built brands for global companies, working directly on yours — with an AI production layer underneath that removes the cost of execution, not the quality of the decisions.
01
Senior from the first call
No account layer, no juniors learning on your brand. The person deciding your positioning is the person who has done it for companies you know.
02
Three weeks, not three months
Fixed scope, fixed date, one revision round. Agencies take a quarter because of process, not because the work needs it.
03
Built to keep working
You leave with a system your team and your AI tools can run without us — not a PDF that goes stale in a month.
Execution used to take months and most of the budget.Now the same budget buys the whole brand layer.
The old wayZepnie
Production 80%Your brand 20%
The decisions are human, and so is the eye on every asset before it ships. What changed is that production no longer eats the budget — which is why you get positioning, identity, a deck and a landing page in three weeks, for what execution alone used to cost.
The name
zepnie /ˈzɛp.ɲɛ/
Polish zepnie — to fasten together; to clip separate pieces into one that holds.
A startup's brand arrives in fragments: a logo from one place, a deck from another, a site a founder built over a weekend, and a voice that changes with whoever is writing. None of it is wrong. It just doesn't hold together. Our job is the fastening — one system where the parts stop contradicting each other, and stay that way as the company grows.
The team
Your team — twenty years working for brands you already know.
Zepnie is led by people who built and ran creative teams for global companies — the work large brands pay agencies for, applied to companies at the start. Every asset that ships is reviewed by a senior designer. The production layer runs on AI, which is why this costs what it costs.
Filip Kozusznik
20 years of creative direction, positioning, business performance and P&L ownership, and building AI into creative processes.
Brands he has worked forAbbVie · Allegro · Bank Pekao · McDonald's · Nestlé · Novo Nordisk · Siemens · VISA
Radek Czajkowski
20 years of art direction, identity and brand design. Human review on every asset that leaves the studio.
Brands he has worked forAbbVie · Allegro · McDonald's · Novo Nordisk · Siemens
zepnie.AI
The third member of the team. Runs generation, versioning and asset production around the clock — never decides anything. People make every call that matters.
For accelerators & incubators
Give your cohort a brand they can raise on.
Zepnie works as the creative partner of incubators, accelerators and venture builders. Your companies get founder pricing and a fixed delivery schedule across the cohort. You get a programme benefit that shows up on every demo day.
- Cohort pricing below list, contracted directly with each company
- Delivery scheduled across your programme calendar
- A consistent quality bar across the whole portfolio
- Partner terms on any work that follows
FAQ
Questions founders ask.
How long does it take?
Three weeks from kickoff for Brand Brain. Scoped and dated before you sign.
What if we pivot in six months?
Most early companies do. The system is built to extend rather than be replaced, and brand.json makes changes propagate instead of forcing a rebuild.
Do we own everything?
Yes. Full IP assignment on final payment, including source files and cleared font and asset licences.
Who actually does the work?
A small senior team. No matching algorithm, no rotating freelancers, no juniors learning on your brand, no agency with high ratecards.
Is this AI-generated?
Decisions are made by people. Production is AI-assisted with senior human review on every asset. That combination is why it takes three weeks, not twelve.
What's a brand brain?
A small folder of structured files that describes your brand in a form both people and AI tools can read. Instead of a PDF someone opens twice, you get a source your team, your freelancers and your own AI tools all work from.
Do we need GitHub for this?
No. It's a folder of plain text files — put it wherever your team already works. A repo is convenient if you have engineers, but Drive or Notion work exactly the same.
We already have a logo. Can we keep it?
Often yes. Brand Brain covers refining an existing mark as readily as building a new one.
Why not use a design subscription?
Subscriptions execute briefs well, and they assume you already know what your brand should be. If you do, they are a good choice.
We are not in the US. Does that matter?
No. We work with startups across the US and Europe, and contract and invoice accordingly.
What happens after the project?
Nothing you have to buy. Many companies move to Product or Scale when there is a reason; the Brand Brain work stands on its own.
What do you need from us?
Roughly four hours across three weeks: one kickoff call, one direction decision, one revision round.
Tell us what has to exist, and by when.
Forty-five minutes. You leave with a scope, a date and a price — whether or not you work with us.
- One kickoff call, scoped and dated before you sign
- A senior team on the work from the first call
- Brand Brain delivered in three weeks