We unlock the value hidden inside your business.

When hackajob began planning its Series B funding round in 2022, it faced the daunting reality that HR Tech is often disproportionately affected during economic downturns.

Headlines announcing hiring freezes had become commonplace, and VCs were pressuring their portfolios to prioritize capital efficiency over growth. On top of this, investors' focus had shifted from market share capture to profitability, resulting in a significant decline in Series B investments from the previous year.

Despite the challenging macro environment, hackajob was still on course to achieve $10m ARR and even though the tech industry was encountering difficulties, the demand for skilled tech professionals at large enterprises remained high.

The answer was to go back to first principles. Not chase the trends of the moment, but rebuild the story from the ground up, moving it from what hackajob does and how, to why it mattered now.

We grounded the engagement in a clear investment thesis first. That thesis became the foundational narrative for the investor deck, the cohort analysis, the vision and the TAM, woven into a compelling investment case investors could underwrite and build conviction in.

Earth Observation had been lauded for its enormous potential ever since the science first emerged with NASA's Landsat program in the early 70s, but several challenges had always stood in the way.

Inconsistent and siloed data had eroded trust in the accuracy of EO data, and the industry had been plagued by accessibility issues, customers needing sophisticated internal functions and the sheer expense of specialist talent just to extract meaningful value from it.

A handful of markets like agriculture, mining and defence had spotted the value early and built the capability in-house, while the wider enterprise market stayed locked out.

So the challenge was not only to tell Aspia's story, it was to overturn the ghost of the last one. Investors had watched this category promise the world and then stall, and a deep-tech venture out of the Harwell Space Campus in Oxford, combining astrophysics, deep learning and satellite imagery, would have to convince them the moment had finally changed.

What had changed was the convergence of EO data and deep learning. Aspia had tackled the data consistency problem head-on with ClearSky, a patented, cloud-free data product more accurate than anything else in the market.

On top of that data sat EarthPT, a foundation model and a factory-like capability that could launch new downstream applications for specific enterprise use-cases and make consuming EO insights easier than ever before.

The commercial signals were already there. Aspia had won multi-year, six-figure, high-margin ARR contracts with zero marketing spend and zero churn, its primary customer had renewed, and it had built partnerships with Planet Labs and the European Space Agency.

We grounded the engagement in a seed-stage thesis on how transformer-based AI was unlocking the future of earth observation. That thesis became the foundational narrative for the raise, the deck, the financial model and the funding round strategy, weaving Aspia's science, traction and market forecast into an investment case investors could build solid conviction in.

As new technology put more capability into customers' hands, large banks and financial institutions faced the same dual challenge of digitising their legacy manual, paper-based processes while simultaneously exploring how these new technologies could transform the customer and employee experience.

Two shifts were colliding at once. New devices and channels were rewriting how a customer could be reached, verified and onboarded, and a new way of building was emerging from Silicon Valley, small multi-disciplinary teams shipping in weeks what large institutions took months to deliver. Barclays had both problems and no story to connect them.

The narrative needed was a transformation story, not a technology one. The world has changed, in both customer expectations and in the way new products get defined, tested and built. Here's how Barclays will evolve and lead.

That story compounded across retail and commercial, online, mobile and in-branch: current accounts, deposits, lending, credit cards, mortgages, insurance, pensions, relationship-manager tools. Product after product prototyped and shipped, the winners doubled down on, the whole programme held together by a single through-line that never stopped living and breathing.

Santander wanted to harness the powers of five early-stage Seed to Series B startups to build a new SME lending proposition that could transform the UK's SME lending landscape and plug the massive funding gap UK SMEs faced due to a lack of underwriting data.

Loan origination in one startup, a data lake in another, machine-learning SME intelligence in a third, credit and data verification in a fourth and fifth. Five young companies, five cultures, five roadmaps, and no proposition tying them into something a customer would recognise or a bank could take to market.

That was the brief: be the glue. Sit above the technology as the build and proposition partner, and turn a collection of best-in-class parts into a single coherent offer, and give it a story a major bank could stand behind.

From customer and market immersion through to the working customer journeys, the disparate parts were shaped into one proposition, one experience, one narrative, that carried the sponsorship of Santander's global CEO.

Everything else in life was getting smart, connected, voice-activated, data-rich, while the workplace was still being designed as four walls and a floorplan.

CBRE could see the office was the next environment waiting to be transformed, with sensors and machine learning, voice control, the data a building could capture and act upon was radically changing, and they needed a way to bring that future to life for their own customers.

The strategy was to build a living narrative for the AI-driven, data-rich workplace that reframed the future tech stack of the office and it would transform the tenant experience. In parallel, it also changed how CBRE's clients perceived them, from managing space to shaping the future of it.

Woven through that story were hundreds of use cases, from room and meeting management, building usage and analytics, and smarter interactive environments, that once clients saw them, they needed them across their portfolios.

MR. D had built something rare, a studio that takes iconic consumer brands into new spaces, protecting the legacy while unlocking new growth.

What they needed was a refreshed story behind it, a new proposition sharp enough to change how the market, and their biggest clients, understood what they were really worth.

Working alongside the MR. D team, arketyp crafted the proposition, the positioning and narrative that reframed the business from design studio to growth partner. They brought the craft and the client relationships; the engagement gave it a story boardrooms could buy into.