Cusp.ai
Branding the start-up with a mission to solve climate change with artificial intelligence.
Brand identity
Transforming the field of carbon capture by leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence.
The startup, founded by AI luminaries, has developed an AI-powered platform that functions as an engine to generate cutting edge material design. This technology rapidly generates and evaluates novel material structure.
Their first goal: transforming the field of carbon capture. Their AI platform aims to evaluate and generate materials that can selectively bind carbon dioxide, with a focus on reducing CO2 removal costs to around $100 per ton.
The brand mark itself came out of the science. We went deep into atomic structures, carbon capture, microstructures and more - landing on a symmetrical, repeating form, with a water droplet worked in as a quiet nod to climate-positive work.
Most of what Cusp needed wasn't consumer-facing, the brand had to do its heaviest lifting in B2B and press contexts: funding pitch decks, internal docs, LinkedIn etc. We deliberately avoided the green energy clichés of climate branding, focusing on a visual language that was equal parts technical and credible, not decorative, while still creating desire.
‘Months, not millennia.’
Every climate fix, next-gen chip, and clean energy breakthrough hits the same wall: nature takes millennia to perfect a material. That bottleneck - not imagination - was the real obstacle. And with AI's public story mostly framed as a threat, Cusp needed to tell the opposite one: the same technology, aimed at solving it.
