The Project
Six weeks, one startup, and a product almost nobody outside the lab could explain in plain language. That was the starting point for our IPEUS project in Silicon Valley.
Three students from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts moved to San Jose to work as an external marketing team for a local deep tech company. The brief was not a case study or a simulation. It was a real mandate with a real founder, a real deadline, and material that would go live on the company’s website and into its next funding round.
We ran the project the way a small agency would. A kickoff to define scope, weekly syncs with the client, written status reports every Friday, and a clear split of roles across research, content strategy, copywriting, and design. Decisions were documented as we went, so the project stayed consistent even as the product and the priorities kept moving.
The result is a complete content package, built from scratch in six weeks, and presented at Swissnex in San Francisco.
NuMorph AI
Our client, NuMorph AI Inc., is a pre-seed startup based in San Jose. The company builds nature inspired AI software for computer vision at the edge, borrowing from the efficiency of biological vision systems.
In practice that means machines that can see reliably where conventional setups struggle. Very low power, very low latency, and usable in dark, foggy, or GPS denied environments. Think drones without satellite signal, robots on an unstructured factory floor, or inspection systems that need to work in near darkness. The founding team brings experience from NASA research, LG, Samsung, and Infineon.
The technology was never the problem. The communication was. NuMorph AI already had a 17 page technical whitepaper and an investor brochure, both written by engineers for engineers. Impressive if you have a background in neuromorphic computing, impenetrable if you are an investor, a buyer in robotics, or a potential partner in aerospace.
Our job was to keep the substance and change the entry point, so that the story starts with the customer’s problem instead of the architecture behind it.
Deliverables and Project Scope
The scope was defined at kickoff and confirmed with the founder in the following weekly sync: five workstreams, structured to build on each other in sequence.
The work begins with focused research into comparable US and European deep tech startups, benchmarking how they structure whitepapers, brochures, and landing pages. This research forms the basis for the content strategy, rather than a matter of taste.
From there, the scope covers a marketing whitepaper, a rewritten version of the technical original that leads with use cases and proof points. Next is an updated brochure, followed by a landing page built as a single HTML file for lead generation, with form logic grounded in conversion research rather than assumptions. Use case content and demo links round out the package.
All of it follows a design specification written in-house, covering typography, colour palette, and page structure, with supporting graphics built in code so they match that identity exactly. In parallel, the work is coordinated with a second student team handling the company’s SEO and website, with a clear boundary around who owns which surface.
Project Results
Content Coming soon just after the final presentation and project handover.
Life in Silicon Valley
Our project hub was the JJ Lake Business Centre in Mountain View. That is where the weekly status meetings took place and where the smaller events happened, ten minutes from the campuses whose logos sit on half the devices we own. For everything else we did what visitors have done for years and rented a classic Airbnb in Sunnyvale.
Seen through European eyes, a few things stand out fast. People are remarkably friendly and genuinely helpful, and small talk with a stranger in a queue is normal rather than suspicious. Almost everyone drives a Tesla, to the point where a full parking lot looks oddly uniform. And without a car you are essentially stranded, because the distance between two addresses that look close on a map is rarely walkable.
The food deserves its own paragraph. Portions are generous, the range of cuisines within a few blocks is hard to beat, and whatever anyone says about American cooking, the deep fryer is handled with real expertise.
Six weeks later, the pace and the openness were the things we wanted to take home.
TGIF with Project Provider
We had a lot of fun and some genuinely interesting conversations about the work our project provider Deepak did for NASA earlier in his career. We also traded plenty of amusing startup ideas, and all in all it made for a very good TGIF.
