Do A-List Investors Predict the Demise of PR Firms?

PR software startup Upbeat announced the completion of $1.5 million in financing from an illustrious list of investors, including accelerator programs Stanford-StartX, Y Combinator and 500 Startups as well as a roster of famed Silicon Valley venture firms, among them Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Draper Associates, SV Angel, Maverick Capital, and First Rock Capital.

Upbeat is a software-powered, next-generation PR platform with plans to disintermediate the public relations industry as we currently know it. If Upbeat’s co-founder and CEO Ricky Yean is correct, entrepreneurs with early-stage startups may soon forgo working with pricy Silicon Valley public relations firms, which typically demand contracts of six months to a year and charge upwards of $10-15,000 per month, instead choosing to work with Upbeat’s automated PR platform serving both companies and journalists.

Upbeat charges companies $800 for an annual contract, which includes a single initial PR campaign; additional campaigns are $500 each. Upbeat is selective about which clients it works with, selecting to work only with companies it judges credible, stories it considers unique, and news that is time-sensitive and relevant. Upbeat’s platform offers a story-building tool that helps companies create media-appropriate pitches, and it also provides a set of sophisticated journalist-matching capabilities so companies can connect to the right journalists and avoid spamming reporters with irrelevant stories.

Ricky Yean, CEO and co-founder of UpBeat

Upbeat’s team includes both software engineers and PR professionals, working together with the aim of reformulating old-school PR for the modern world. In an exclusive interview with Newscenter.io, Yean explained that he believes traditional public relations is overpriced for early stage companies and that typical press releases are outmoded and ripe for extinction.

“We think there is massive opportunity to leverage big data to help make PR more effective that helps everyone involved,” Yean said. “PR is a labor-intensive and inefficient process that frustrates both journalists and entrepreneurs, and we think we can improve it.”

According to the company, the San Francisco-based startup (formerly called prx.co) launched out of beta of its cloud-based PR platform at the time of the funding announcement. Two other companies in the space, Publicize and Press Friendly, are working to address the same market opportunity, but it is not clear that either has received institutional funding.