Foundation

1.1 The company

Since Labs is an AI-native lab in Turku, Finland. It does two things that feed each other:

The lab proves what works. The command center is where what works gets run. That relationship is the brand's whole argument, and it is why the identity is warm and editorial rather than cold and technical — we are not selling software, we are selling the judgement of people who have already done the work.

• Stage: proof-of-concept / pre-seed. Productising demand that was paid for manually first.
• HQ: Turku, Finland. Launch market Finland → Nordics → EU core.
• Programs: Boost Turku Startup Journey 2026; City of Turku PoC grant.
• Founding team: Yuehan John (technical lead), Jaakko Mäkipelto (market, native Finnish), Talha Ahmad (sales, strategy).

Positioning statement

Since Labs is the command center for AI agents — memory, access and mission control in one place. And the AI-native lab that proves every tool on our own company before it reaches yours.

The origin, in one paragraph — use this, it is the strongest asset we have

A client paid Since Labs to deploy AI agents by hand. Five more owners then asked for the same thing, unprompted. Everything the company has built since is the productisation of demand that already existed. We are not solving a guessed-at problem. Say this in pitches. Say it on stage. It is the difference between us and every company that started with a deck.

1.2 Who it is for

Since Labs speaks to owner-operators who are still doing the work by hand. Not CTOs. Not innovation departments. The person whose evening disappears into paperwork.

Primary beachhead — Finnish infrastructure & earthmoving contractors. Owner-operator (toimitusjohtaja) at maanrakennus / maansiirto firms, usually family-owned. 2–30 employees, €300k–€10M revenue, no in-house IT or admin. Tendering, invoicing and compliance handled between job sites. Price anchor €3k–€8k/year.

• Volume motion: 2–15 employee firms, reached through Koneyrittäjät and tilitoimisto referral.
• Trophy motion: larger, tech-forward firms as flagship references.
• Anti-ICP: public sector, firms with an in-house IT/admin department, non-Finnish infra.

Secondary — the Lab's audit clients. Non-technical owner-operators of service SMBs, 5–50 people, who need a plan written for their stack rather than a list of forty tools.

What this means for design

The audience reads on a phone, in a truck, in daylight, at the end of a long day. That is why the palette is warm and high-contrast paper rather than dark-mode neon, why the type is large, and why nothing important is ever communicated by colour alone. The accessibility rules in this guide are not compliance theatre — they are the audience.

1.3 Brand personality

Since Labs sounds like a sharp operator who has actually done the work — not a hype merchant, not a corporate consultancy.

Three adjectives: Proven · Direct · Grounded.

The brand promise

We test every AI tool on our own company first. You get a plan written for your specific stack — not a deck of forty tools and homework.

1.4 The design idea in one line

Warm paper, one hot accent, editorial type, and no decoration that isn't doing a job.

Every other AI company defaults to a dark cockpit with electric blue. Since Labs is cream, terracotta and a serif. That contrast is the differentiation — it is the visual form of "a person who has done the work, talking to you", and it is worth more than any feature list. Protect it.

Three commitments fall out of that idea, and the rest of this guide is their consequences:

1. Paper is the ground. #F7F5F2, not white and not black. Roughly 60% of any surface.
2. Terracotta is a scalpel. #C4602A on ~10% of a surface. When everything is accented, nothing is.
3. The serif carries the feeling, the sans carries the work. Lora for what you are meant to feel; DM Sans for what you are meant to do; Geist Mono for what the machine said.

1.5 Brand architecture

Since Labs is a branded house. There is one brand, and products are named plainly underneath it.

Since Labs                        ← the masterbrand. Always "Since Labs", never "SinceLabs".
├── The Lab                       ← the consulting arm (AI Audit, AI Training)
└── The Command Center            ← the platform
    ├── Sora  🏗️                  ← Finnish municipal permit fees
    └── <next app>                ← same pattern

Rules

• Products get a plain, short, human name and an emoji icon, not a sub-logo. Sora is 🏗️. This is deliberate: an app must be addable without a designer in the loop, and emoji survive at 16px in a launcher list where a bespoke glyph would not.
• Products never get their own colour, typeface, or logo. They inherit everything. An app is a room in the house, not a house.
• Never write "Since Labs Sora" — it is "Sora, on Since Labs", or just Sora once context is established.
• Product names are not capitalised in running prose beyond their own name: "the Sora register", not "the Sora Register".
• The two internal contexts of the platform are Workspace (what customers see) and Operator console (what staff see). These are interface words, not brand names — lowercase them in prose.

1.6 Naming conventions

Retired framing — do not reuse. The two-sided "AI agent marketplace" and the "builder portal" were shelved on 2026-07-25. If you find them in a deck, a page or a repo, it is stale. Replace, don't perpetuate.

1.7 What would make this brand wrong

A useful test. If a piece of work does any of these, it is off-brand no matter how good it looks:

• It could be any AI company's. Swap the logo and nobody notices.
• It promises a transformation instead of naming an outcome with a number on it.
• It uses a glowing brain, a humanoid robot, or a circuit-board background.
• It is dark, blue, and gradient — the default cockpit aesthetic we exist against.
• It decorates. Every element in a Since Labs layout is load-bearing.
• It is louder than the thing it is describing.

Sources: Since Labs Notion — Agent.md (2026-07-25 GTM correction), Brand Guidelines v1 (2026-06-03), Brand Design System Skills (2026-06-06); live sincelabs.com; sincelabs/app at df8eb7e.