Startup branding is evolving—fast. With the 100 things Google announced last week at I/O 20251, ChatGPT shaping how we write and think, and tools like Figma AI and Midjourney transforming design workflows, you need to rethink efficiency and creativity.
If you're racing to launch, you're not alone. Speed and scalability have become top priorities for startups. AI tools promise to deliver faster results, better designs, and smarter content: keeping up with the speed of the AI landscape is no easy task.
We’ve been testing, refining, and implementing AI-driven workflows across visual identity, verbal strategy, and content creation. In this article, we explore our most-used tools, tactics, and latest trends.
Which AI tools deliver the best results in startup branding?
Visual identity creation
Midjourney
When we first adopted it, results felt experimental. Today, our creative team uses it to explore distinct visual languages for startups across sectors like SaaS, biotech, and travel tech. With the right prompt, you can generate imagery that is both scalable and brand-aligned, especially for abstract backgrounds, diverse personas, and custom scenes.
Midjourney allows you to generate high-quality visuals in a wide range of artistic styles, quickly and efficiently. The key to success lies in the prompt: the more detailed and precise your instructions, the more tailored and on-brand the result. You need to engineer it nearly like you would do with a hand-drawn image.
If the prompt is not 100% perfect, you can expect results like the image below. Not quite what we meant when we said: Skyscraper building facade with a grid-like pattern of square windows, some of which are open, revealing glimpses of the interior. In one of the open windows, a white man, around 35 years old, with short brown hair, is seen wearing a white shirt. In another window, the lower half of a person wearing khaki pants and a brown belt is visible…
Miqui Troncoso, brand designer at The Branx points out:
One of the things I like most about Midjourney is its collaborative approach. You can explore prompts of other designers and learn from them.
Freepik
We use Freepik as an everyday tool to help us develop brand identities. It's especially useful for finding images of people—potential target audiences for our startup clients—or to highlight personal benefits when using their product. It also helps us quickly create mockups, allowing us to visualize the brand in a real and believable context. The strength of Freepik is that it is a platform that combines different tools, giving it a competitive edge.
If you want to leverage AI not only for static, but for motion content, check out our blog post about the best AI tools for video creation.
How to prompt it right: On-brand visuals
- Start with the subject: Is it a founder portrait, abstract background, futuristic cityscape, or a startup office scene? Example: “A female founder standing confidently in a modern, glass-walled startup office”
- Define the style, mood and atmosphere: Choose a style that aligns with your brand personality. What emotional tone should the image convey? E.g. calm, dynamic, inspiring, futuristic, warm lighting...
- Define your color palette: If you're working within a startup branding system, reference your brand colors.
- Direct how the image is framed, e.g. bird’s eye view, portrait orientation, etc.
- Add technical parameters either in the prompt or in the settings.
When prompted right, you get on-brand imagery with a creative twist that would have taken much longer to create in Photoshop & Co. See how we leveraged AI-imagery in this brand video for the tech startup Diamo.
How does startup branding improve with AI and automation?
Unique visual landscapes
Stock imagery is so 2023. Honestly, if you see one stock photo more on a website, the creators are miles behind. AI-created images add variety and also consistency to company imagery.
On the one hand, it gives startups the opportunity to stand out, with unique prompts that create a fully branded visual landscape no one has ever used before: for people photography and for abstract visuals. New faces, new settings, new surroundings; AI people imagery is an opportunity to add diversity and enhance a company’s diversity and inclusion values. AI gets rid of boundaries for abstract visuals, designers can create everything they can imagine - with the right prompt.
Design consistency
Once the right prompt is defined, AI tools can generate images aligned with your visual identity—scaling output while keeping brand integrity intact. This supports both in-house teams and founders with limited design resources in building a recognizable startup brand identity.
Copy content & verbal identity creation
ChatGPT
Let’s be honest: when ChatGPT first appeared, many creatives feared job displacement. Today, it’s one of the most powerful assistants in our toolkit. At The Branx, we use ChatGPT for:
- Summarizing research for brand audits
- Drafting first versions of blog posts, landing pages, and social copy
- Testing out variations of tone and style
What are its limitations?
ChatGPT can speed up your content production and consumption. However, without a good prompt, you’re also lost. If you want the AI to write and sound like your company voice, you have to train it. You need to define your tone of voice and your content strategy, you have to know and try what works. It won’t do the job for you.
Also, you need to be careful with AI hallucinations: that is, when an AI makes stuff up. Recent developments show that the newest and most powerful technologies are generating more errors, not fewer. The handle on facts by OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek has gotten shakier and it’s not entirely clear why. An AI cannot decide what’s true and what’s false. On one test, the hallucination rates of newer AI systems were as high as 79 percent.2
For the average private user of AI, those hallucinations may not be a big problem. However, it’s a serious issue for anyone using the technology with court documents, medical information, or sensitive business data. So, always double-check the output.
Do I prompt for humans or for LLMs?
Having said that, completely relying on AI-generated content is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, if you train your favorite AI model in a way that it makes optimal use of SEO keywords, you might gain SEO juice and are more likely to show up in AI search.
The ongoing change from SEO to AIO (AI optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is notable. In Google’s I/O 2025, they announced that AI Overviews have scaled up to 1.5 billion monthly users in 200 countries and territories.
Training AI to write content that is optimized for AI search but doesn’t feel too artificial is one 2025’s biggest challenges.
In the end, there will also be real users navigating on your web, not just OpenAI and friends.
There is the belief that search engines have been punishing websites with solely AI-generated content. Google states that this is not true, as long as the content is unique and valuable to the user. What does this mean? Google expects you to revise the content and to add input that is the result of your proper brain power.3
You need to engineer your prompt and provide AI your proper input. Saying “summarize these three blog posts into one” won’t work. AI will probably not create perfect content from scratch. So, while you can use AI to research, write, and edit your content, you should be involved to ensure that the content is high-quality and valuable.
How do I prompt it right?
Prompt engineering has become as vital as creative thinking. Without a strategic prompt, even the most powerful AI won't reflect your startup.
To prompt like a pro:
- Create a project in your AI workspace (e.g., ChatGPT Pro or Gemini).
- Upload examples of your current brand tone, copy, or visuals.
- Define your tone of voice in detailed instructions.
- Include your target SEO keywords.
- Give the context: where the content will be published, the goal, audience, and desired format.
- Iterate and review: never publish without revision and a human touch.
Our latest AI recommendations for startups
Gemini 2.5
With improved performance in reasoning, coding, and math, Google’s Gemini 2.5 is positioning itself as a serious competitor to ChatGPT-4.5.4
We use it to:
- Summarize customer feedback
- Extract key information from a call
In terms of features, ChatGPT does outperform Gemini, though. ChatGPT offers a huge range of different GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT that combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills. The equivalent to the GPTs are Gemini’s “Gems”, but the offering is still limited. In both, users can create their own versions, GPTs and Gems, where they can upload project information, files, etc. to tailor the answers exactly.
NotebookLM
NotebookLM is Google’s AI-powered research and note-taking assistant, purpose-built to help users navigate and make sense of complex information. As part of Google’s Gemini ecosystem, this tool synthesizes content from multiple sources like PDFs, Google Docs, websites, and even YouTube videos into coherent, contextual insights.
Unlike generalized AI models, NotebookLM is grounded in the specific materials you upload. This means the quality of its output directly depends on the quality and relevance of your input—a key distinction from tools like ChatGPT, which draw from broader (and often less focused) data pools. For startup founders and content creators, this targeted approach offers greater control and reliability, especially when working with proprietary documents or detailed branding strategies.
One of its most innovative features is the ability to generate audio overviews: dynamic dialogues between two virtual speakers based on your uploaded content. You can specify which topics to emphasize, select your preferred output language, and even join the conversation by asking real-time questions. This functionality not only enhances content comprehension but also opens up new opportunities for interactive brand storytelling and automated content review: valuable assets for any or tech-driven business.
Listen to the discussion of this blog post post created by NotebookLM:
Google AI studio
Whereas the features of Google’s AI Studio seem unlimited, there is one feature Jesus Coto, CEO at The Branx and AI-enthusiast, points out to startup founders: Stream, a functionality which enables you to work hand-in-hand with AI. By sharing your screen, the AI can "see" what you're working on. You can even talk with the AI: ask questions, request assistance, or get explanations about the content on your screen in real-time.
The AI uses the shared screen content to understand your requests better and provide more relevant and targeted help. For example, you could ask "How do I use this feature in this software?" while pointing to it on your screen, or "What's wrong with this line of code?"
Wrapping up: AI and automation in startup branding
Dos
- Use AI for scalable, on-brand visuals
- Automate content ideation and research
- Use it as a smart co-worker
Don’ts
- Design your logo with AI
- Build a brand strategy solely with AI
- Let AI take decisions on your TOV, brand personality
- Just copy-paste content without revision
AI and automation are essential tools in modern startup branding. From generating on-brand high-quality visuals to developing SEO, AEO, and AIO-optimized texts, today’s teams have unprecedented access to creative acceleration and operational efficiency.
But while these tools can supercharge your branding efforts, they’re only as effective and good as the strategy and the team behind them.
Prompt quality, human oversight, and brand consistency still matter.
The goal isn’t to let AI take over; but to use it smartly, to scale faster without compromising authenticity.
Sources:
1 https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-io-2025-all-our-announcements/
2 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/technology/ai-hallucinations-chatgpt-google.html
3 https://www.gotchseo.com/does-google-penalize-ai-content/
4 https://textcortex.com/post/gemini-2-5-pro-vs-chatgpt