Thunai: From Logo Redesign to Complete Brand Transformation

Thunai is an AI-driven intelligence platform built to transform how businesses access, understand, and act on knowledge. From analyzing hundreds of thousands of call-center conversations to creating a centralized, living knowledge base, Thunai helps businesses around the world take raw data and turn it into actionable insights, seamlessly and at scale. 

When Thunai approached Payan Design, we had discussions about a new logo. When we worked closer with them, we realized they weren’t just looking for a new logo. They needed a brand that could match the ambition of their product, one to scale globally, communicate trust, and feel human in a world where AI can feel overwhelming. 

What followed was not a redesign.

It was a brand transformation.

Consider a call center handling over 500,000 L1 (Level 1) calls. Each call holds usable data, customer pain points, product insights, operational gaps. But without a powerful intelligence to sift through the data, the knowledge is unreachable and invisible. 

Thunai could ingest all L1 calls, extract insights, and allow teams to ask questions directly from a centralized AI-powered knowledge base. Even better, this could be used for better alignment across different departments, CRM, Marketing, sales, training, the world could be your oyster. 

Thunai needed a brand identity that could match their stratospheric ambition. 

As we talked to Thunai, we identified three issues:

Mismatch between brand and business

The existing logo didn’t reflect an intelligence-driven platform. The visual language felt disconnected from the sophistication of the product.

Lack of scalability

The brand wasn’t designed for global expansion, enterprise adoption, or multi-platform usage.

Visual clutter

The logo was overly complex, reducing memorability, legibility, and impact. Thunai’s redesign needed to be rethought from the ground up to make a brand that could reach across the globe.

At Payan, we believe strong brands are built on understanding their needs, aspirations, ambitions, and actions. We began with a questionnaire designed to do two things.

1. Completely understand Thunai’s product, users, and long-term vision. 
2. Ensure the clients at Thunai had absolute clarity on the end goal of this project and how we would get there. 

After that, every decision that was made between Payan and Thunai, whether it was visual, strategic, or symbolic, was rooted in the idea of enhancing clarity above all else. 

We first created a brand archetype, based on our discussions with Thunai. We positioned Thunai under The Sage archetype.

The Sage seeks truth, clarity, and understanding, not through dominance, but through wisdom. This aligned seamlessly with Thunai’s role: an AI to guide, not to direct, one to empower teams by making knowledge accessible and reliable. 

The Sage archetype influenced the tone and overall brand presence that we would eventually craft.

As we explored the visual direction, we were able to give Thunai options they could genuinely resonate with, not just tick off at the end of a meeting. 

When we arrived at the winning direction, we knew we were at a bold and grounded idea.

The final logo is built around the Tamil letter “உ”.

In Tamil, “Thunai” means support or companion.

The letter “உ” symbolizes life, continuity, and presence, becoming a perfect embodiment of Thunai’s role as an intelligence partner.

We were able to create this minimalist, AI-first logo. Globally recognizable, yet culturally rooted. Open and inclusive in form

Thunai had something distinct, belonging all to themselves, and scalable. The Tamil lettering tells a story rooted in Tamil identity, history, and culture, but built for the whole world. 

Once we delivered the logo, we were also able to provide them with a brand guideline document.

Following the redesign, we delivered a comprehensive brand guideline document that covered the following: 

• Logo variations and correct usage
• Color palettes and contrast rules
• What to avoid (misuse, distortion, incorrect colors)
• Application across marketing, product, and brand touchpoints

This empowered Thunai’s team to scale without diluting the brand, and most importantly, kept in sight their consistency, clarity, and longevity.

With this collaboration, Thunai was able to achieve what they set out to do, get a brand identity aligned with their AI-first and intelligence-first approach. They were able to get a logo that was not only simple and symbolic, but also timeless enough to be ready for the future. They were able to arrive at a visual language that communicated the trust and wisdom that they’ve shown us, and finally, created a foundation for them to build on growing globally for businesses all over. 

This project was more than just making a logo look better. We wanted to create something that made Thunai’s expertise make sense instantly, intuitively, and globally.