Backing Original Minds in New Spaces
Design is Our Due Diligence
We don’t follow playbooks. We build what hasn’t been built—through capital, design, and narrative alignment. Our process connects creators to context, form to meaning, and capital to what truly matters. It’s not linear. It’s alive.
About NOEMA
NOEMA backs those who don’t fit the mold—because they’re the ones reshaping it.
We raise and deploy capital in service of ideas with soul—ideas that arrive as contradictions: poetic and pragmatic, rigorous and strange, rooted yet boundaryless. We partner with founders and creators who move fluidly between disciplines—art and commerce, intuition and execution, design and systems—and who are building things that look like nothing else.
We’re drawn to work that speaks in the language of architecture, objects, systems, and cultural memory. To projects shaped by lived experience rather than trend cycles. To efforts that don’t just enter markets, but reframe them—because they emerge from a deeper logic.
We don’t specialize in backing tech companies, and we’re not here to chase the next AI app or platform. That’s not our space. But we’re not averse to technology either. We engage with it when it serves the idea—when it’s embedded in a deeper logic or form. What matters to us is intention, clarity, and resonance—not whether something is “tech” or not.
We’ve spent decades learning how to match capital with intent—where money doesn’t just accelerate a project, but aligns with its deepest purpose.
NOEMA was born at the intersection of precision, invention, aesthetic devotion, and human-centered design.
Its founder has spent a lifetime building what didn’t yet exist. As Global Head of Design for the Apple Studio at Accenture/Fjord, he led work for some of the most exacting and high-stakes teams in the world—where design was infrastructure, and aesthetics were inseparable from systems.
Before that, he authored patented innovations in healthcare technology—bridging clinical complexity with human need. And beneath it all, there has always been a fierce, personal commitment to aesthetics as meaning: to architecture, to silence, to the sacred power of form. Not as luxury, but as language. Because design, at its best, does not decorate rather it reveals, supports, and dignifies what it means to be human.
efore founding NOEMA, our work shaped initiatives for some of the most influential and exacting organizations in the world—Apple, UBS, Silicon Valley Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Chanel, Hermès, Gucci, and Uniqlo. These were environments where design wasn’t decoration—it was responsibility. Where systems, aesthetics, and human needs had to cohere at the highest level.
But NOEMA wasn’t created to scale that past. It was created to transcend it—to bring that same level of clarity and craft to the edge of what’s next: to things that don’t yet have language, but already have form.
We are not consultants. We don’t sell templates, tweak decks, or follow playbooks. We align capital with clarity. We shape narrative, define structure, protect design integrity, and help founders and creators carry what they’re building through the murk, through the inflection points, and into the world.
NOEMA is early by design. We like ambiguity. We thrive in the moment before language exists for what you’re doing. And we’re good at helping it take form—coherently, powerfully, and without compromise.
How do we engage?
Capital Strategy
Advising on how, where, and when to deploy capital—whether financial, human, or relational—to amplify vision, preserve design integrity, and build the infrastructure required for meaningful and resilient growth. We treat capital not just as fuel, but as a structuring force—one that must align with narrative, timing, and long-term intent.
Design Advisory
Crafting the strategic story that aligns people, place, and purpose—used as a compass across brand, product, and decision-making—and advising on the design of products, spaces, and experiences to ensure every touchpoint embodies the narrative, context, and material intelligence behind the work.
Business Structuring
Building or reimagining organizations around design-led principles and culturally intelligent models of growth.
Growth & Transition Planning
Supporting projects through key inflection points—moving from design to deployment, prototype to scale—by partnering with trusted collaborators while preserving the project’s core values, narrative, and intent. This is often where long-term alignment with NOEMA begins to take shape.
How we help ambitious people lead with narrative, design for change, and build for growth.
Narrative Alignment
At NOEMA, we align vision with place, creator with context, and narrative with need. Our methodology was developed through our founder’s work with Apple and honed across architecture, design, art, and technology—fields where form must follow more than just function; it must follow meaning.
We believe every great business or project begins with a precise arc—one that links the ambition of the creator to the demands of the world around it. We uncover and articulate this arc by grounding it in site, not just as a physical location, but as a lived environment: a geography, a culture, a system. Whether it’s a building, a product, an installation, or a platform, everything starts with alignment—between who is building, what is being built, and where it lives.
This isn’t positioning. It’s narrative as infrastructure: the deep architecture beneath strategy, design, and capital. When fully realized, it becomes a shared North Star—intelligent, resonant, and resilient. It organizes complexity, clarifies intention, and unlocks long-term coherence. The outcome is not just visionary but executable. Not abstract, but alive in materials, relationships, and decisions.
This is how we build: not from trend, but from truth. And that is what endures.
Design for Change
Design at NOEMA is the act of making meaning tangible. Whether we’re shaping a product, crafting an experience, structuring a business, or designing a subtle intervention in space, we begin by translating the narrative arc into material form. This isn’t aesthetic surface—it’s the embodiment of intention. We work closely with form, material, and context, ensuring every element is in conversation with the story that underpins it. But design is rarely linear. As we model, sketch, prototype, and build, we often uncover new relationships—spatial, emotional, or conceptual—that reveal sharper truths. When that happens, we return to the arc. We revise it. We let the design refine the story just as the story guides the design.
It is in this phase that allocation becomes real. The narrative helps us understand not just what we’re building, but where capital has the most leverage—whether in materials, talent, craftsmanship, or strategic visibility. We make funding decisions with clarity, sequencing investment based on what brings the most narrative coherence and enduring value. Our collaborators span disciplines: architects, industrial designers, engineers, business leaders, filmmakers, interaction designers, sound designers, graphic designers, and artists. Each brings a distinct intelligence to the work—not to execute tasks, but to compose something living. We make with extreme care—care as precision, as presence, as commitment. Every decision, from a structural gesture to a visual or sonic texture, is intentional. We hold space for clarity and for the sacred discipline of making things that endure—not because they are fixed, but because they are true. This is design as devotion: iterative, embodied, and alive.
Growth
The movement from design to growth is where many projects falter—not for lack of vision, but for lack of fidelity. At NOEMA, we treat scale not as replication, but as expansion: a process that must remain faithful to the narrative core while adapting to new geographies, new partners, new systems. This phase requires discipline. What held meaning at the prototype or local level must now prove itself under pressure—operationally, financially, culturally. We help leaders navigate this inflection point by building growth strategies that are both scalable and expressive, ensuring the original intelligence of the design is not diluted, but translated. The goal is not speed, but coherence: a path where brand, business, and experience evolve without dissonance.
This is also where capital becomes catalytic. We work with teams to identify what must remain intact and what must be modular—what can grow linearly, and what requires non-linear bets. We bring in the right partners—whether they are manufacturers, channel leads, cultural connectors, or investors—and build conditions for scale that honor the original arc. Growth, in this sense, is not a function of size but of integrity: the ability to expand without fracture. From limited edition to mass production, from a singular activation to a global system, we guide this passage with rigor, clarity, and care. Growth becomes not the end of the design, but its fullest expression.
Reach out
We’re always interested in meeting thoughtful people—founders, designers, investors, or anyone building something original. Whether you’re looking for capital, strategic partnership, or just want to start a conversation, we’d love to hear from you.
NOEMA is early by design, selective by nature, and open by principle.
Reach out to me in Instagram or WhatsApp. Even if it’s just to say hello.
Chad Aston
ca@noemaloop.com
+1 212 918 9291
