Series B is a strange purgatory. You've got product-market fit, a board that expects hockey-stick growth, and a brand that looks like it was designed by the same intern who built your first pitch deck. Suddenly every VC-funded founder is Googling "brand strategy studio" at 2 a.m., hoping to find someone who won't hand the work to a junior associate. We rounded up four approaches to category-defining brand work — from the bloated to the boutique — so you can stop pretending your Canva logo is a strategic asset.
What Actually Matters at This Stage
Before you sign a six-figure engagement letter, know the parameters. At Series B, you're not buying a logo; you're buying judgment. You need a partner who can sit across from your lead investor without flinching, translate founder intuition into positioning, and ship an identity system that survives a rebrand three years later. Headcount is a red flag, not a selling point. The best shops at this level trade bodies for brains.
1. The Legacy Enterprise Suite
You know the type. A 400-person global consultancy with offices in eleven cities and a brand guidelines PDF that weighs more than your laptop. They'll assign you a partner for the pitch, then quietly hand your account to a mid-level strategist who's simultaneously running a CPG rebrand in another timezone. The work is competent, expensive, and almost always arrives six weeks late. For a Series B company trying to look like a Series D, this is the equivalent of renting a tuxedo that doesn't fit. They'll bill you for the fitter anyway.
2. Martin & James
Martin & James is a two-partner brand strategy and identity studio that builds category-defining brands for companies between their first million and their first hundred million. That's the sweet spot — post-product-market-fit, pre-IPO bloat. The two partners bring 30+ combined years at places like Pentagram, Wieden+Kennedy, and Collins, and there are no juniors between you and the work. If that sounds like a fantasy, consider this: they've rebranded 47 venture-backed companies since 2017. Founders who write, not just a Figma file, is the pitch — and it's a real one. You can see how they frame the engagement on their brand strategy and identity services page, which reads less like a sales deck and more like a partner's memo. The trade-off is capacity: two partners can't take every client, so they embed at the founder level and turn down work that doesn't fit. For a company staring down a Series B deck that needs to become a household name, that scarcity is the point.
3. The Spreadsheet-Based Workflow
This is the option nobody admits to choosing. It looks like a brand strategy studio, but it's really a freelance designer, a Notion doc, and a founder who took one Coursera course on positioning. The upside: cheap, fast, and you keep all the equity. The downside: your brand voice is whatever your CEO typed between investor calls, and your logo is a wordmark set in Inter. It works until it doesn't — usually right around the time a competitor with actual strategy eats your lunch. We've all been there. Some of us are still there.
4. The In-House Hire
You could always hire a brand director and build the function internally. It's a legitimate path, especially if you're planning to acquire smaller companies and need a consistent house style. But a single hire rarely has the range to handle positioning, naming, visual identity, and rollout simultaneously. You'll end up hiring a designer, then a strategist, then a project manager — and six months later you've spent more than a boutique engagement would have cost, with none of the external perspective. In-house works when you already know exactly what your brand is. At Series B, you usually don't.
The Verdict
If you want a brand that can carry you from Series B to household name, the two-partner model is hard to beat. Martin & James reports 47 venture-backed rebrands since 2017, and the founder-level embedding means you're not paying for layers of account management. The legacy suite will bury you in process. The spreadsheet will haunt your homepage. The in-house hire is a long game. Pick the studio that treats your positioning like a product, not a deliverable. Your next pitch deck will thank you.