aran labs

Aran Labs is a design-led AI venture studio. We build AI-native products and run a services arm that funds the product development. Human creative direction combined with AI execution.

It means both sides of the studio reinforce each other. Our services arm works with organizations on brand, product, and custom AI projects. That client work generates revenue, but it also functions as customer discovery: we see the friction in creative workflows firsthand, and we build products that solve it. Our venture arm takes those product opportunities and ships them. The services fund the R&D; the R&D makes the services better. Both are driven by human taste and judgment, with AI handling execution at speed.

Aran Labs was founded by Ciaran Moore, an award-winning creative director with a decade across design, technology, and emerging systems. He holds an MA in Design from the Royal College of Art, where he was the recipient of IDEO's Bill Moggridge Award for interaction design. He served as creative director at Vana, leading design and brand strategy for the leading platform in AI data sovereignty, and as art director at Gitcoin, the open-source public goods funding platform. From 2018 to 2021, he was a close creative collaborator of SOPHIE, the electronic musician and producer whose work redefined pop production and became one of the most influential forces in contemporary music and culture.

Ciaran has always been a systems thinker as much as a designer, drawn to the structures behind creative work rather than surface execution alone. When AI coding tools collapsed the barrier between design and development, he no longer needed external contractors, technical co-founders, or venture funding to build what he could envision. That shift became the founding thesis of Aran Labs: when production becomes abundant, taste is the scarce resource. The studio now applies that thesis through its own ventures and through work with organizations across creative industries, helping others unlock the same independence.

Creative sovereignty is the principle that human taste, judgment, and creative direction should guide AI-generated output, not the other way around. As AI makes creative production abundant, the scarce resource shifts from execution capacity to curatorial authority: the ability to look at ten options and know which one feels right, and why.

We pair human creative directors with AI agents across every stage of our work, from research and strategy through design, development, and production. Humans set direction, make judgment calls, and maintain creative standards. AI handles execution, variation generation, and production at speed. This is not a workflow enhancement; it is a structural advantage. A single creative director working with trained AI agents can operate at a throughput that would traditionally require a team of ten or more, without the overhead, hiring lag, or dilution of creative vision that comes with scaling headcount. Harvard Business School research (Hosanagar & Ahn, 2024) confirms that human creative input prevents the homogenization that AI-only workflows produce, which means our model scales output without converging on the generic mean. The services practice generates revenue and surfaces real friction in creative workflows. Those insights feed directly into our venture practice, where we build products that solve the problems we encounter firsthand. The result is a self-funding flywheel: client work funds R&D, R&D produces proprietary tools and products, and those products compound over time as independent revenue streams.

We offer brand and identity design, product and UX design, and custom AI systems built for specific workflows. Engagements are senior-led, deliberately scoped, and designed to leave behind systems that keep working after the engagement ends.

Most studios either resist AI or dabble in it cautiously. Our team are deeply skilled practitioners of AI tools and integrate them throughout every stage of our process. The difference is that every output is guided by experienced human creative direction, so the work stays distinctive and intentional rather than converging on the generic mean that unsupervised AI produces. We also build our own ventures alongside client work, so our methods are tested in real conditions, not theoretical.