About Karda
Karda is a one-person product design studio for founders and companies building in AI, deep tech, consumer hardware and beyond. Interfaces, prototypes, decks and the front-end code to go with them, from 0 to 1.
Hi. I’m Thomas Le Borgne, product designer & founder @ Karda. I co-founded nanoguild, a French community of deep-tech and hard-tech builders. I solder, print and wire things at home. That is a hobby, and it is how I learned what a hardware constraint feels like from the inside.
- Experience
- 8+ years in product design
- Worked with
- Orange, an energy group, and others under NDA
- Based
- Paris, working remotely across Europe
Most hard technology dies between the lab and the people who need it.
The science holds, the demo works for the team, and adoption never comes. Nobody made it legible to an investor, a customer or an operator.
I believe humanity moves forward through technology, and that the technology we need next is hard: energy, space, health, defense, the machines that make things. Whether it gets adopted is a design problem. Not how it looks. How it works for the people who touch it.
I spent 8+ years on that passage, in telecom and energy, on products used by millions of people. Thinking in systems, holding a product vision across teams, deciding what ships first, and shipping the interface that turned a finished technology into something people used. I want to put those years where the work matters most.
I’ve done it at scale. Products used by millions, inside large organisations. Systems thinking, product vision across teams, prioritisation under constraint. The decisions a founder makes every week, made many times over.
I build. I prototype in code, with AI tooling end to end, so what you test behaves like the real thing. It is also how one person covers research, interface, system and front-end at the pace a funded team needs.
I live around the people building this. nanoguild is where I spend time with deep-tech founders: their hiring, their sourcing, their firmware, their demo days. None of it is abstract to me.
I go deep. Papers, docs, specs. I keep asking until I can explain your technology back to you, then connect the dots between your field and the people at the end of it.
Three situations bring founders to Karda.
An idea. It needs to exist as something you can click.
A raise. Investors need to see the product and not the slides.
A product that isn’t there yet. It works, but it isn’t usable, and it doesn’t convince.
The output fits the situation: a prototype for the idea, a demo and a deck for the raise, an interface for the product. How it is made does not change. In your constraints, with your engineers, close enough to the founder that nothing gets lost in a handoff.
It starts with a call. We work out what you need before you spend on it. Most founders arrive with a symptom. The call is where it becomes a scope.
Three things can follow. The scope says which one.
A first piece. A product audit, a landing page, a deck. Small enough to quote on the call, and the audit comes off the price of a project.
Fixed project. One scoped piece of work, 2 to 6 weeks, with scope, timeline and price agreed before the start. A prototype, an interface, a system, and a plan for what to test, fix or build next. Most engagements begin here. From €6,500.
Embedded design. A senior product designer in your team. Days per month set together, in your tools and rituals, reviewed monthly. Some teams start here. Most arrive after a project, once the work has earned it. The first engagements open in January 2027.
Let’s talk about what you’re building.
An idea on a whiteboard or a product already shipped — tell me what it does and what’s in the way.