On refining a VC brand: meet Nauta Capital’s new look

“Overall because branding is about creating and sustaining trust, it means on delivering promises.” Wally Olins

Often the concept of ‘brand’ is understood in terms of a name or the visual marker associated with a product or a company. Indeed, when asked to name a brand, the first name that may come to mind for many is likely to be a consumer-facing one.

This is because consumer-facing brands are the trendsetters of the branding movement — by using a range of tactics that appeal to customer emotions — these brands build awareness and brand equity at scale.

For B2B brands the story is different…

Purchases of products and services are motivated primarily by need while decisions are made based on facts and figures. A B2B customer would seek out a product or a service to solve a problem or make something work better.

These core differences in customer behaviour means that for some B2B companies, a comprehensive branding exercise can come at a later stage.

Nevertheless, even in these scenarios, a brand may emerge slowly as various stakeholders experience and tell stories that involve the company.

And this was the story here at Nauta Capital.

After more than a decade of investing in Europe’s top emerging software startups, with offices in London, Barcelona and Munich, we wanted to take a moment to do a slight introspection and review our brand experience.

As a B2B company — we understood that our track record, portfolio and investment thesis were at the core of our brand essence.

Similarly, we knew it was time to refine the outer elements — our visual identity at different touchpoints and our core messages so that entrepreneurs and other stakeholders knew exactly who we were as a Pan-European VC.

With this in mind, we are excited to unveil our fresh new look…

By keeping our existing logo and introducing complementary colours and gradients, custom iconography and a new font family, we evolved our visual identity without losing our history.

What’s more, with our newly launched website, it’s never been easier to learn more about our 40+ portfolio companies, what we invest in, and most importantly, how entrepreneurs should reach out to us.

We hope you like our new look, and feel free to reach out to us with any feedback you have (we believe in feedback loops and iterations too!)