Cypress Climate

The Brief

Cypress builds emissions analytics software for industrial supply chains. By the time we joined, the product had matured into a serious enterprise tool, but the brand had been built quickly in the seed round and now read as a hobbyist climate site against polished competitors. The team was preparing for a Series B and a buyer conference appearance, and needed both to land within a single quarter.

Strategy

We compressed our usual discovery into a structured two-week sprint: founder interviews, customer calls, competitor teardown, sales-call recording review. The buyer the team kept losing to wasn't a competing platform — it was internal inertia. Cypress needed to feel less like a startup pitch and more like a default choice. That reframed the brief: the work was as much about credibility as differentiation.

Identity

The wordmark is a confident, slightly condensed grotesk drawn to read clearly in financial and policy documents. The visual system uses a neutral, almost monochromatic base — graphite, paper white, soft eucalyptus — with charts and data overlays as the primary expressive surface. We deliberately avoided every category cliché: no leaves, no globes, no green-to-blue gradients.

Product UI

Eliot led a redesign of the four highest-traffic dashboards in collaboration with Cypress's product team. Information density rose, cognitive load fell, and the two metrics that customers had been emailing screenshots of are now the first thing they see when they log in. The full UI rollout shipped in nine weeks.

Investor Materials

We produced the Series B deck, a long-form investor narrative, and a set of executive briefing documents. The deck was deliberately quiet — a single chart per slide, generous margins, very little prose — which the lead investor later cited as the reason the partnership was willing to fast-track diligence.

Outcome

Cypress closed a $48M Series B led by a top-tier climate-focused fund three months after relaunch. Sixty-two new enterprise customers signed in the launch quarter, qualified inbound demos more than doubled, and median sales-cycle length fell 41% — partly product, partly brand, mostly (the team will tell you) the new pricing page.