Columbia Tech Ventures
Bridging Breakthrough Ideas from Lab to Market
Client: Columbia Tech Ventures Sector: Deep Tech / University Innovation Commercialization Partnership Type: Recommended Agency Partner — Portfolio-Wide Deliverables: Institutional education, brand language, investor narratives, visual identities, pitch decks Portfolio Companies Served: Mearas, Stepwise, Tyfast, Rapid Ventures
The Partnership
Columbia Tech Ventures is the commercialization engine connecting Columbia University's research and innovation ecosystem to the market. Their mandate is to take the most promising ideas coming out of one of the world's great research institutions and find a path from lab to commercial reality.
Relay was brought in as a recommended partner to their portfolio — not on a project-by-project basis, but as an institutional resource. The relationship covers two types of work: building creative and brand capability across the portfolio through direct education, and delivering that brand work with individual companies.
The founders CTV supports are a specific kind of client. They are inventors first — scientists, engineers, and veterans who have spent years developing breakthroughs the world doesn't have references for yet. Most have never run a company. Most have never worked with an agency. Most have never had to explain what they do to someone who isn't already a domain expert. The technology is real. The conviction is real. The vocabulary to communicate both to investors, partners, and customers often isn't — yet.
Relay's role is to close that gap. Not just for individual companies, but for the ecosystem itself.
The Education: Building Better Briefs
Before doing the work for CTV's portfolio companies, Relay built the curriculum to teach those companies how to commission work effectively in the first place.
The Building Better Briefs workshop is a structured education program developed specifically for first-time founders working with creative and agency partners. The premise: a great brief doesn't just result in better creative — it helps an agency understand your business, cultivates work that actually moves the needle, and builds the kind of partnership where less time is spent on misalignment and more on execution.
The point isn't that briefs should be philosophical. It's that a brief should define the problem, not the solution — and that most first-time clients confuse the two.
For CTV's founders — people building things that have no direct comparison, often for audiences they've never marketed to before — this curriculum is foundational. Knowing how to work with a creative partner is a skill most clients develop over years of practice. The workshop compresses that learning into a single session and gives founders a framework they'll use in every creative engagement for the rest of their careers.
The Work: Portfolio Companies
With the briefing foundation in place, Relay worked directly with CTV portfolio companies to build the brand language, investor narratives, and visual identities each needed to grow — across engagements with Mearas (electric ground vehicles for contested environments), Stepwise (smart energy management for the home), Tyfast (vanadium oxide battery technology for heavy-duty vehicles), and Rapid Ventures (energy consulting).
Each engagement is its own case study. But the work shares a set of throughlines that reveal something consistent about what deep-tech founders need — and what traditional brand processes miss when they try to serve them.
The technology was never the story. In every engagement, the founders were leading with what they built: the mechanism, the material, the architecture. All of it accurate, none of it the pitch. The work was consistently the same — find the consequence of the technology, not the technology itself, and build the story from there. What breaks without this? What changes when you have it? Those questions, answered precisely, do more work than any technical specification.
Every company needed to name something that didn't exist yet. These aren't iterative products in established markets. They're new categories, new chemistries, new classes of vehicle and infrastructure. Without a name, audiences map a new thing onto the closest existing thing — and the fit is always wrong. The work of naming (Mission Mobility Infrastructure, Energy Unlocked, Breaking the Diesel Cost Barrier) is the work of creating a conceptual home before anyone can walk through the door.
The strongest argument was already in the room. In every case, the insight that unlocked the story wasn't invented — it was excavated. The economic proof point was buried in a table on page 26. The visceral problem statement was in the founder's spoken explanation but had never made it into a headline. The contrarian thesis was implicit in the product's design but had never been said out loud. The work was sequencing, not invention: find the thing the founder already knows, surface it, and put it first.
The audience was always in the wrong place in the narrative. Every deck was written, consciously or not, for someone who already understood the technology — a peer, a scientist, a fellow domain expert. Investors, fleet operators, utility executives, and defense procurement officers aren't that person. Reorienting the story for the person who needs to be convinced — rather than the person who already believes — changed the structure of every engagement we touched.
Competition was being fought on the wrong battlefield. Each company was comparing itself to existing things in ways that made it look smaller than it was. The work consistently moved the comparison axis: from feature-level to category-level, from chemistry to economics, from regulatory mechanism to consumer pain. When you define the category, you don't compete inside it — you set the terms.
These are first-time business people, not first-time thinkers. The intimacy this work requires is different from anything in a conventional brand engagement. These founders are world-class at what they've built. They've spent years, sometimes careers, developing something genuinely new. What they haven't done is explain it to a stranger in under three minutes. That gap — between what the inventor knows and what an audience can receive — closes differently for each person. It requires sitting with them until they stop presenting and start explaining, until the thing they've been circling around without landing on finally comes through. When you play their own ideas back to them in language more precise than what they had, something shifts. The story stops being a pitch and starts being a belief. That's the unlock — and everything built on top of it, from the investor deck to the visual identity, holds together in a way it couldn't before.
What This Partnership Is
Most agencies serve clients. Relay built a relationship with CTV that runs deeper than any individual project — a position inside the ecosystem itself, as an educational resource and creative partner for their entire portfolio.
The Building Better Briefs workshop means that every CTV founder — whether they work with Relay or any other partner — leaves with a framework for commissioning creative work effectively. That's not a marketing deliverable. It's a capacity investment in the next generation of deep-tech entrepreneurs.
The founders CTV works with are changing how the world moves, powers itself, and defends itself. They deserve a story as strong as what they've built.