DNAir

DNAir’s founders were building a new kind of data company.

Airborne environmental DNA can inform biodiversity management, agriculture, biosecurity, public health and infrastructure. The founders wanted to collect biological data from the first hundred metres of air, at scale.

The old single-page site described biodiversity monitoring, so visitors placed DNAir alongside the monitoring services it wanted to move beyond. The name caused trouble too. People wrote it in one case and could not tell how to say it.

The founders named the challenge themselves. They needed to keep the size of the vision and still give each audience something concrete.

The vision needed a concrete way in.

The name stayed. The typography solved it.

The wordmark splits at the centre of the A, with one side heavier than the other, so it reads as DNA and Air at once. The icon is a helix drawn with loose, wavy strands that suggest airflow.

The founders wanted to stand apart from the greens common across nature tech. The palette pairs purple with dark teal, and the typeface, BW Gradual, keeps the system modern and practical.

DNAir reached the final of the >>venture>> 2025 startup competition in Switzerland.

By then the founders had carried the positioning into their own pitch. We wrote the final speech with them and redesigned the deck around it.

The speech moved between feeling and logic. It opened by asking the room to take one breath, then told them what that breath had carried in, from spores and soil microbes to the wolf that passed through at dawn. A satellite comparison did the explaining. Satellite imagery once made the surface of the Earth visible, and governments, farmers, insurers and energy companies now buy it to make decisions. DNAir set out to do the same for biological data.

The founders kept every claim inside the evidence. Lines that promised early warning, or described data the sensors had yet to collect, came out of the script.