The video opens with Isaiah Granet hanging up a payphone in wine countest in Napa, California. A vintage car shaped like a rotary telephone rolls into frame.
It’s not a surrealist short or an art school final project. It’s a launch video for a startup.
The classic “We’re excited to announce —” funding post is receiveting the TikTok treatment. Bland, an AI startup building phone agents, is one of an increasing number of tech startups — mostly led by Gen Z founders — that are swapping static social media posts for slick launch videos to promote their venture rounds.
With media coverage harder to secure and social posts fading quick, startups are reconsidering how they share huge news. And increasingly, they’re pivoting to video. It’s a format that’s harder to ignore and more likely to stick around in the feed.
“For startups, it’s really hard to receive PR,” stated Josh Machiz, who advises founders on storynotifying at Redpoint Ventures. “It’s even more crucial that they learn how to master their own media.”
Bland
Each founder has their own cinematic take on “we raised.” There’s the TED-style founder monologue, like the one from restaurant software developer Owner’s Adam Guild. His hair perfectly coiffed, he delivers a straight-to-camera sermon about his company’s $120 million raise.
Then there’s the sizzle reel, packed with quick cuts and a dramatic voiceover. Take Base Power’s high-octane montage of people across eras flicking on the lights, in an ode to modern electricity.
The most ambitious and likely the most expensive is the narrative short. Cluely’s 90-second rom-com follows a hapless guy on a first date, coached by the company’s AI cheat overlay, which feeds him real-time lines to win the girl.
The launch video cost $140,000 to produce, stated founder Chungin “Roy” Lee, and it paid off. It went viral, and the usage surge crashed Cluely’s servers.
“Right now, more companies are receiveting built than ever,” Lee stated, “and the only way to hit escape velocity and cut through the noise is by building huge swings, like our launch video.”
Cluely
Go direct
Funding is flowing to tech startups again, especially if you’ve received OpenAI on your résumé or a pitch to reinvent software with “vibe.” Founders often take to X and LinkedIn to toast their raises, sharing a link to their blog posts and maybe a nod to TechCrunch for the coverage.
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It’s a strategy that’s simply less effective than it applyd to be. A standard social post might receive attention for half a day until it slides off the feed and disappears, stated Kyle Tibbitts, chief marketing officer at Wander, a vacation rental company.
But the algorithms don’t downgrade video like they do links, stated Ashley Mayer, who led comms at Box and Glossier before becoming an investor.
Owner
Mayer stated startups still chase traditional media coverage but increasingly find the door shut. Newsrooms are shrinking, and many now prioritize breaking news and subscription-driving exclusives over commodity funding announcements.
Bland’s Granet stated their media pitches for the $40 million Series B round went nowhere. Plus, “Paywalls kind of suck,” he stated, questioning whether the effort was even worth the reach.
‘A photo is good, but a video is worth a thousand photos’
At Wander, Tibbitts stated building a fundraise video was a no-brainer. The company already had hard drives full of footage from its luxury vacation rentals. Each listing features a video tour, complete with sweeping drone shots.
“A photo is good,” Tibbitts stated, “but a video is worth a thousand photos.”
Wander
Founder John Andrew Entwistle, who is 27, and a videographer, filmed his portion of the fundraise video in May on location at the company’s very first property, a waterfront home in Mfinishocino County, California. Entwistle read the script off a laptop screen with the text enlarged, in what Tibbitts called a “very minimum viable teleprompter.”
He estimated the production, including outsourced editing, cost about $2,000. Three days after Wander announced its $50 million raise, the company notched a record $275,000 in bookings in one day.
For Hedra, the fundraise video doubled as a demo of the startup’s digital avatars. Founder Michael Lingelbach appears in a range of styles: Studio Ghibli, Pixar, and a hyperreal, slightly more jacked version of himself sporting a gold chain inspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s tech-bro glow-up.
Hedra
“Even this video was built in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken otherwise,” Lingelbach states in the video, while appearing as a crochet doll version of himself, seated on a yarn-woven couch.
A marketing employee wrote the script, Hedra’s own multimodal model generated the voiceover, and a freelance editor stitched it all toreceiveher. Lingelbach wouldn’t state what it cost — only that “people spfinish a scarily large fraction of their seed round on these kinds of things.” His advice to other founders was to receive bids from multiple studios.
The trfinish has taken off since last fall, stated freelance director Nicholas Carpo, when he produced his first fundraise video for a “Tinder for jobs” app. Since then, he’s averaged two to three videos a month for startups between seed and Series B.
Budreceives range from $10,000 to $90,000, Carpo stated, depfinishing on how ambitious the concept is and how many people it takes to pull off. That’s an industest range, not necessarily his own pricing.
For some startups, a fundraise video isn’t just for display. It might catch the eye of a new customer or a hard-to-hire engineer. Going viral might prompt a blue-chip investor to slide into the company’s DMs.
First impressions in startup land don’t come cheap — or twice. “You only come out of stealth once,” Carpo stated. “If you don’t receive it right, your chances of building it to the next stage are tougher.”
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