Cofounder by GIC

Brand, web design and engineering·2026·

Credits

Injecting AI optimism into a master brand and its first product, painted as a tech utopia.

Cofounder by GIC

Brand, web design and engineering

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We’ll tell this one backwards, starting from the recent launch and working back to where it began. To set the stage: Cofounder is the first product from General Intelligence Company of New York. The master brand and the first version of Cofounder launched in early September 2025. Then, in May 2026, we helped Andrew and the team relaunch it with a bigger vision.

The platform had grown from a natural-language automation tool into a more complete operating system for founders. Updating the website wasn’t about replacing a design that had stopped working, but about recognizing that the story had gotten bigger.

The product had gained more depth, more use cases, and a bolder vision, so the brand experience had to grow with it. The redesign became a continuation of work we’d already started: keeping what made the first version memorable, while building a stronger structure for a more mature story.

The first key visual was meant to capture the idea itself - the dream of your company running on its own, hence the calm, almost fable-like scene sealed inside a glass globe, like a miniature, self-sufficient world that simply works. The other one, named “Press Start to Run a Company” leaned into game aesthetics: keyboard shortcuts (A, B, C, D) instantly jump you into a “how to run a business” tutorial, as if you were picking an option from a title screen menu rather than reading a company website.

KV1 / The Dream of a Self-Running Company

KV2 / Press Start to Run a Company

Neither direction was meant to be literal, both were a way of testing, at the composition level, how much of Cofounder’s value could be felt before a single word was even read.

Designing a new mental model

Explaining new features was less of a challenge than replacing existing assumptions.

Most AI products position themselves as assistants: tools you ask of questions or delegate tasks to. Cofounder operates differently. AI isn’t another window in your workflow - it becomes part of the company itself. Sales, marketing, operations, hiring, customer success: each function is represented by specialized agents working in parallel, while humans remain responsible for decisions that require judgment.

Instead of telling people this through marketing copy, we wanted them to experience it from the very beginning.

Every section of the website was designed to reveal another piece of the operating system until the product gradually made sense.

Ultimately, a lot of the value isn’t only in the software itself, but in the how. Cofounder is an implementation of the real product: the method. So it makes more sense to swap product-feature tours for opinionated guides on starting and running a company.

Chapter 1 How To Start

Chapter I

by Cofounder2026

Read this chapter (I)

Chapter 2 How To Build

Chapter II

by Cofounder2026

Read this chapter (II)

Chapter 3 How To Sell

Chapter III

by Cofounder2026

Read this chapter (III)

Chapter 4 How To Scale

Chapter IV

by Cofounder2026

Read this chapter (IV)

The guidebook is one of Cofounder’s core pieces of value, so its layout needed its own round of exploration. We researched a range of directions, from editorial, long-form reading layouts to something closer to a quick-navigation manual, built for scanning rather than reading start to finish.

Neither extreme was quite right on its own: editorial layouts felt too slow for something meant to be referenced on the fly, while manual-style navigation felt too utilitarian for content this central to the product.

We landed in between. The guidebook is now structured as chapters with their own sub-sections, laid out in a persistent left-hand navigation for fast jumping between steps, while the content itself sits comfortably on the right with generous room to breathe. It reads like a real guide when you want to sit with it, and it’s fast to jump around in when you just need the next step.

Killing our darlings

It’s nothing new to want to signal how much care went into the product. The trick was not overdoing it. Small details like the animated card in the footer, the interactive word search highlighting different industries, and a set of considered micro-interactions add personality without pulling focus from the content.

Dawid Cedrych

@dcedrych

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Killed a lot of darlings on the way to the final @intelligenceco Cofounder 2 website, well worth it!

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12:58 PM · May 12, 2026

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Every element was designed with intention, creating a light, playful experience that invites exploration while maintaining the clarity and confidence expected from a B2B product.

Cofounder is an agent orchestration platform designed to run an entire business.

Run a company

Trust over hype

Cofounder is built to run your company, not to impress in a demo. The challenge was staying optimistic without naive, technical without cold, playful without losing credibility.

The origin story

As mentioned at the beginning, we created the first Cofounder alongside the master brand back in 2025. The brief sounded cliché but carried a deeper meaning: ‘What if Studio Ghibli designed software?’ In other words: show utopia, the things we all long for - carefree time spent in nature, warm evenings and sunsets. Not a story about AI, but about a world we’ll get to experience more and more as AI takes over the dull parts of our work.

Somewhere along the way, pixel art emerged, and from there it shaped the entire visual language, both for The General Intelligence Company of New York and the first version of Cofounder.

With thanks to Andrew, Abhishyant, and Samarth - the best partners we could’ve asked for on this.