The best way to understand deep-tech founders is to spend time with them.
nanoguild is a French community of builders in robotics, space, energy, AI and the other hard fields — 300+ engineers, students, researchers and founders who meet to build things together. I co-founded it and made most of what it runs on: the identity and the site, the robotics workshops, Nanobase, a directory of European deep-tech companies, and the film that launched it.
Deep tech in France is spread across labs, startups and garages that rarely meet. nanoguild gives them a room: people who want to learn, discuss and get their hands on robotics, new space, energy, computing, biology and AI. It’s also where I learned what these founders actually deal with — hardware lead times, firmware, sourcing, hiring — before offering to design for them.
An identity that makes hardware look approachable. A simple wordmark and type system, and a library of cut-out hardware — a robot arm, a wing, a printer — on a neutral grid. Real objects, shown plainly: the technology is the visual, not an abstraction of it. A new field joins the brand by adding an object, not by redesigning it.
The website. Who the community is for, the fields it covers, and the events, written up on the same template each time.
Robotics workshops. Hands-on sessions where members source parts, assemble 3D-printed robot arms and build use cases on top — computer vision with OpenCV, for instance. Organising them means dealing with the same things a hardware founder does: parts that don’t arrive, firmware that doesn’t flash, a demo that has to work in front of a room.
Nanobase. The question that kept coming up at events was “who in Europe is actually building this?”. Nanobase is the answer: a public directory of European deep-tech and hard-tech companies, their projects and the writing around them, built from scratch and sourced by hand, open to submissions.
A launch film. A short film for the Nanobase launch, cut from footage of European high technology: labs, machines, prototypes. Made to show what the directory is a list of.
None of this was a client project. It’s here because it shows the ground Karda stands on: a working knowledge of what deep-tech and hard-tech teams build and struggle with, a network of the people building it, and the range to make what a founder needs around a technology — identity, site, platform, photos, film — not only the interface.
Let’s talk about what you’re building.
If this looks like your problem, or nothing like it, the first call is where we find out.