Take the Hard Out of Hard Tech

Matter spun out of Kleiner Perkins to back the founders building the physical infrastructure the next era of technology depends on—chips, robotics, energy, and advanced manufacturing. With backing from TSMC and a partner track record that includes DJI, Desktop Metal, and the team behind LuxVue’s acquisition by Apple, Matter had the pedigree. What it needed was a brand that could speak to hard tech founders as fluently as it understood their world. Dakotomy named the firm and built its strategy, identity, and website from the ground up.

The Challenge

Hard tech is the most unforgiving path in startups. Founders navigate prototyping, supply chains, capital intensity, and scale-up risk that software companies never face—and they know it. They don’t want a generalist investor who treats atoms like bits. They want a partner who has lived the difficulty of physical production and can help them through it. Our challenge was to signal that hard-won expertise instantly, before a single conversation.

The Work

We started with the name and the strategic core: take the hard out of hard tech. It works as both a promise and a point of view—Matter knows exactly how difficult building in the physical world is, and exists to shoulder that difficulty alongside its founders.

The narrative moved away from generic deep-tech language toward the specific realities of physical production. It positioned Matter as the firm backing the infrastructure the AI era will run on, speaking the operational language of the founders building it.

The brand identity balanced engineering rigor with warmth—precise and grounded, but human. A confident, industrial-leaning system communicated genuine fluency with hardware without feeling cold or clinical.

The website carried the position all the way through, demonstrating the firm’s command of the challenges of hard tech and making Matter’s expertise legible to the founders and LPs it was built for.

The result is a firm whose brand matches its pedigree—one that tells hard tech founders, immediately, that Matter understands the hardest problems they’ll face and is built to solve them together.