How Google Venture „stole“ our logo and we had to start over

2015 was a great year for us. We had just founded our innovation consultancy called GANDT Ventures and the first few customers came walking in. After a few months, I decided that it was time to get a little bit more professional. We needed our own logo, a corporate identity and a few fancy business cards.

Little did we know that the designers on our team was so great, that they managed to come up with a nearly identical logo to that which Google would “come up with” a mere 6 months later for their brand new Google Ventures Brand.

Just a few months after we had proudly started using out new logo design, Google launched their new brand identity with a nearly pixel-perfect copy of our GANDT Ventures logo in 2016.

Needless to say… We were more than a little shocked the first time we saw it. The resemblance is just uncanning…

Being a small startup, with very limited resources and in a small insignificant market for Google (Switzerland), we decided to just wait for a few months and not make any sudden irrational changes.

„My heart told me that we should fight it, make a nice little PR-story out of it and explain to the world that Google had „stolen“ our design”