Startup funding announcements are getting the TikTok treatment, thanks to Gen Z founders

Business Insider

5 hours ago

The video opens with Isaiah Granet hanging up a payphone in wine country 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 getting the TikTok treatment. Bland, an AI startup making 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 fast, startups are rethinking how they share big 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 get PR," said Josh Machiz, who advises founders on storytelling at Redpoint Ventures. "It's even more crucial that they learn how to master their own media."
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, said founder Chungin "Roy" Lee, and it paid off. It went viral, and the usage surge crashed Cluely's servers.
"Right now, more companies are getting built than ever," Lee said, "and the only way to hit escape velocity and cut through the noise is by making big swings, like our launch video."
Go direct
Funding is flowing to tech startups again, especially if you've got 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.
It's a strategy that's simply less effective than it used to be. A standard social post might get attention for half a day until it slides off the feed and disappears, said Kyle Tibbitts, chief marketing officer at Wander, a vacation rental company.
But the algorithms don't downgrade video like they do links, said Ashley Mayer, who led comms at Box and Glossier before becoming an investor.
Mayer said 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 said their media pitches for the $40 million Series B round went nowhere. Plus, "Paywalls kind of suck," he said, questioning whether the effort was even worth the reach.
'A photo is good, but a video is worth a thousand photos'
At Wander, Tibbitts said making 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 said, "but a video is worth a thousand photos."
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 Mendocino 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.
"Even this video was made in a fraction of the time it would've taken otherwise," Lingelbach says 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 together. Lingelbach wouldn't say what it cost — only that "people spend a scarily large fraction of their seed round on these kinds of things." His advice to other founders was to get bids from multiple studios.
The trend has taken off since last fall, said 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.
Budgets range from $10,000 to $90,000, Carpo said, depending on how ambitious the concept is and how many people it takes to pull off. That's an industry range, not necessarily his own pricing.
For some startups, a fundraise video isn't just for show. 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 said. "If you don't get it right, your chances of making it to the next stage are tougher."