Alpaca:
The “No BS” VC

When the general partners at early-stage seed firm Corigin Ventures (CV) approached us, they had a hunch that the startup and venture capital communities didn’t fully understand what CV stood for, or where it invested.

The major problem was that Corigin Ventures was spun out of a much larger real estate company named Corigin, so much of the market viewed CV as a Property Technology VC due to the Corigin name’s significant ties to real estate. The CV brand also didn’t have a defining story or message to help it stand on its own.

So we embarked on changing all that.

We began by developing a brand strategy rooted in the partners’ collective ambition of becoming a more dynamic, modern and stand-out brand that balanced their hard-hitting investment approach and background as successful founders, with their softer side as genuinely thoughtful VCs who offered incredible support to founders. The strategy leveraged the idea of being one team with real grit who avoided the BS that some VCs are known for.

We then renamed the firm. After an exhaustive exploration of hundreds of ideas, we landed on a more evocative, sticky and downright fun name — Alpaca. Yes, Alpaca!

The new name more accurately represents the team’s core values and strengths as investors. It speaks to the partners’ understanding of the ups and downs of the startup journey, and also to their focus on creating a tight-knit team that takes care of its own.

We rounded out our engagement by crafting a variety of names to brand certain aspects of their offering, including their OneHerd platform to support founders, a newsletter called The Rundown, their Unpacked long-form content and more. We also imbued the brand with a unique voice to capture the edge the team sought, and developed an in-depth messaging platform to help communicate across a diverse range of audiences.

The launch was a tremendous success — it lit up the VC community on social media. Founder and investor engagement continues to climb.