How PR Changes Outcomes Before, During, and After a Raise

Most founders ghost PR until the money hits the bank, then expect one headline after to do six months of trust-building.

That is backwards.

If you are a founder raising capital, build PR before, during, and after the raise because it changes leverage. It changes risk. It changes who wants to back you, work for you, and partner with you.

I have seen a TechCrunch funding feature drive over 1,000 job applicants in a single day for a SaaS company. I have also seen founders partner with private equity, end up in a hostile takeover, and realize too late they had almost no public presence and no leverage when things turned. Those outcomes are not luck. They are a visibility gap.

Investors are not only betting on the business

Investors are betting on the founder’s ability to win.

Early-stage fundraising is promise-heavy by default. You are asking people to believe in a team, early traction, and a future that still needs to be built. When the market cannot see you, investors fill the gaps with caution. This caution shows up as slower timelines, smaller checks, tougher terms, and fewer introductions.

PR helps because it reduces ambiguity. It gives outsiders a way to understand who the founder is, what the company stands for, and why this is not just another pitch deck with a logo and a market map.

Public presence builds trust because it creates consequences

Trust forms faster when there is something to lose.

If a company has no footprint, no third-party validation, and no public accountability, it has very little to lose if it disappoints a customer or misses a promise. People may not say this directly, but they feel it.

Founders with a real public presence, on the other hand, have more at stake. If they fail, the market sees it. If they overpromise, people keep an eye on them. That accountability creates trust faster than any cold outreach sequence.

That is why visibility can affect valuation. The exact same numbers can be interpreted very differently depending on whether the market believes the founder can execute the next phase or not.

Press builds leverage, not attention

If you have spent time around venture capital or private equity, you have heard the line that not all money is good money.

Founders usually nod at that phrase until it becomes personal.

I once had a client come to us after partnering with a private equity group. It ended in a hostile takeover. The founders had not built a public presence, so they had very little leverage when the relationship turned. There was no narrative they could rely on, no external trust they had built, and no public pressure on the other side to behave.

They did not lose because the product was weak. They lost because power was uneven.

Visibility does not replace fundamentals, but it changes the power balance. It makes it harder for other parties to control the narrative when things get tense. It also attracts better-fit investors because the right people can find you earlier.

Before the raise, PR creates investor readiness

The highest-return PR work happens before the raise, not after it.

One founder I worked with knew he would be fundraising within the next year. He spent over six months focused on thought leadership, podcasts, and becoming a reliable expert source in his industry. When fundraising started, he landed an investment from one of the top venture capitalists in enterprise technology. That investor helped close the rest of the round by bringing in his network.

The outcome was bigger than the round. Those investors kept opening doors for enterprise contracts, endorsements, and partnerships.

That founder is now on his fourth successful venture after scaling others to over $100M in ARR and exiting. When we started building again, reporters could not wait to speak to him. Many remembered him and his team from years earlier, and some who had moved to different publications still covered the funding announcement because the relationship already existed.

That is the compounding effect founders underestimate. PR builds memory in the market.

During the raise, narrative can unlock capital

Some companies are not only selling a product. They are selling a category that the public misunderstands.

I worked with a FinTech company aiming to go public within 18 to 24 months. They struggled to secure an institutional investor because BNPL carried a reputation problem. Many investors associated it with predatory lending. In reality, the company provided a needed solution for people who could not extend credit but still needed essentials like a refrigerator or tires for a car.

We shifted the narrative through storytelling anchored in the CEO’s experience. He shared a moment when he was not approved for a Gap credit card despite having a strong credit profile. The reason was that lenders sometimes stop offering credit while still allowing people to apply.

That detail gave journalists a new angle. We began seeing positive stories across major outlets, including Business Insider, Crunchbase, and TechCrunch. That media momentum secured the company’s lead investor and helped land a major retail partner they had not been able to crack. We later rang the opening NASDAQ bell and celebrated a successful launch.

The point is not that every founder needs a dramatic story. You need a narrative that makes the investment easy to explain, internally and in the market.

After the raise, PR pulls talent and protects the next chapter

After a raise, hiring is usually one of the first priorities. A-players are not only motivated by money, especially in today’s talent pool. They want momentum. They want credibility. They want to feel like the company is going somewhere progressive, and that they have a place in it.

This is where press does real work. It gives candidates third-party validation they can trust and repeat. It gives them language to justify the move to a partner, a mentor, or their current manager. It signals stability without the company having to explicitly say “we’re stable.” When the story is clear, high performers self-select faster because they understand where the company is going and what success looks like.

PR also protects future options. The market story that already exists is harder for someone else to rewrite. That matters during the next round, the next partnership negotiation, and the next moment where leverage becomes the difference between winning and being squeezed.

As I always say, press is permanent real estate online. It grows in value as the founder keeps building. Relationships with journalists compound the same way. When a founder becomes a trusted source, they stop chasing coverage and start getting called.

Investors are putting real money behind a bet on the founder and the company. PR before, during, and after the raise is how founders make that bet make sense to the market.