Most companies announce the round and stop. The smart ones use the 90-day window after closing to build the positioning, narrative, and relationships that will drive their pipeline for the next 18 months. The announcement is the starting gun — not the finish line.
What most funded startups get wrong about PR
Here's how it usually goes. Company raises a Series A. The CEO writes a LinkedIn post, maybe a blog. Someone at the VC firm introduces them to a PR agency. The agency sends out a press release. TechCrunch or Sifted runs a paragraph. Everyone celebrates.
Then nothing happens for six months.
I've watched this pattern play out dozens of times — at companies backed by serious investors, with genuinely interesting products. The problem isn't that they don't care about PR. It's that they treat it as an event rather than a programme. Announce the round, tick the box, move on to product and hiring.
And that's where the opportunity dies. Because the 48 hours around your funding announcement are the easiest moment to get attention. Journalists cover funding rounds almost by default. What separates the companies that build lasting visibility from the ones that fade back into noise is what they do after the announcement lands.
A company had spent £45,000 on a PR agency in the six months after their Series A. They had a folder of clippings and precisely zero inbound leads from any of it. The agency had been doing what agencies do — sending press releases, chasing coverage, reporting impressions. But nobody had done the foundational work of figuring out what the company actually stood for in its market.
The 90-day window after your round closes
There's a window — roughly 90 days after you close — when your company's positioning gets set. Not permanently, but durably. Media, analysts, potential customers, and future investors form their initial impression of who you are and why you matter. That impression is surprisingly sticky.
This happens whether you manage it or not. If you don't actively shape the narrative, the market will do it for you. Usually by slotting you into whatever category seems obvious. "Another AI startup." "B2B SaaS for financial services." Whatever the shorthand is, that's what sticks.
The 90-day window matters because you have three things going for you that won't last:
- Novelty. You're new to people's radar. Journalists, analysts, and conference organisers are more receptive to companies they've just heard about.
- Credibility signal. The funding round itself is social proof. "Backed by Index Ventures" (or whoever) opens doors that close again once the news cycle moves on.
- Internal momentum. Your team is energised, your board is engaged, everyone wants to help with introductions. This fades faster than you'd expect.
Waste this window on tactical press release distribution and you've spent your best currency on the lowest-value activity.
What good post-round PR actually looks like
It's rarely a coverage problem — it's a positioning problem.
The companies that get PR right after a funding round aren't sending more press releases. They're doing something much harder and much more valuable: building a narrative architecture that every piece of external communication hangs off.
That means four things, roughly in order:
- A clear market point of view — not "we're building the future of X" but a specific, arguable position on where your market is heading and why most people are wrong about it. The kind of thing a journalist at the FT would quote because it's interesting, not because you asked nicely.
- Executive visibility strategy — your CEO (and maybe your CTO) need to be visible in the right places. Speaking slots, podcast appearances, bylined articles. Not scattergun — targeted at the publications, events, and communities where your buyers and investors actually pay attention.
- Analyst and influencer relationships — in B2B tech, analyst firms still shape enterprise buying decisions. Getting on Gartner's radar at Series A is far easier than trying to fight your way in at Series C when you actually need them.
- A content engine that compounds — one good piece of thought leadership per month, consistently, for 12 months. Not content marketing fluff. Genuinely useful, opinionated work that establishes your founders as people worth listening to.
None of this requires a big PR agency. Most of it requires clear thinking, good writing, and someone who understands how media and markets actually work.
The biggest difference is when the story work happens before the agency gets hired. One company spent three weeks getting their narrative right — the market point of view, the founder story, the competitive angle — before engaging anyone external. Their subsequent agency relationship was half the cost and twice as effective, because the agency was amplifying a clear signal rather than trying to create one from scratch.
The Machani example
When I started working with Machani Robotics, they had zero media presence. A robotics company building autonomous systems for healthcare — genuinely important technology, but nobody outside their immediate network knew they existed.
We didn't start with a press release. We started with positioning. What was the story that would make people care? Not "we make robots" — every robotics company says that. The angle was the UK's healthcare staffing crisis and how autonomous systems could solve a problem that wasn't going away. Specific, timely, connected to something bigger than the company itself.
Within months, they had a 30-minute CNN feature. NVIDIA and Google partnerships followed — partly because the media visibility made Machani look like the company to back in that space. The coverage wasn't the goal. The positioning was the goal. The coverage was the result.
When to hire a PR agency vs doing it yourself
Honest answer: most PR agencies underperform at Series A stage.
Not because they're bad at PR. Because the relationship economics don't work. A decent agency charges £6,000-£10,000 per month. At that price point, you're getting a junior account executive doing most of the work, with a senior person showing up for the monthly call. The junior doesn't understand your market deeply enough to pitch it well. The senior is spread across too many clients to give you real strategic attention.
There are exceptions — boutique agencies with genuine sector expertise, usually run by former journalists or in-house comms leaders. But they're rare, and they're expensive.
What I'd recommend for most Series A companies:
- Spend the first 4-6 weeks getting your positioning and narrative right. Use a fractional comms leader or a short advisory engagement for this.
- Build your own journalist relationships. Founders are almost always more compelling to journalists than agency people pitching on their behalf.
- If you do hire an agency, give them a clear brief. The positioning, the key messages, the target publications, the stories you want to tell. Make them execute, not strategise.
The worst outcome — and it's common — is paying an agency to figure out your strategy while they're also supposed to be executing it. You end up with generic positioning and mediocre coverage. Two problems for the price of one.
The bottom line
Your Series A announcement buys you attention. What you do with that attention in the 90 days after closing determines whether PR becomes a genuine growth lever or an expensive line item that produces nothing but a clippings folder. Get the positioning right first. Everything else follows.