Baden Bower
Baden Bower

One company's stock market debut produced more exit value in a single quarter than the previous decade had. SpaceX's $1.7 trillion IPO dominated the second-quarter PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, released in July, and it sat on top of another record.

U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion in the first half of 2026. That was 29 percent more than in all of 2025 and 15 percent above the previous full-year high set in 2021, according to the report and Axios's coverage of it.

PitchBook itself cautioned that the details tell a narrower story. Megadeals of $100 million or more captured 87.5 percent of the money deployed in the half, and artificial intelligence accounted for 86 percent of dollars invested. Seven rounds of $1 billion or more closed in the second quarter alone.

The concentration was even sharper earlier in the year. In the first quarter, when U.S. startups raised $267.2 billion, PitchBook counted $195.6 billion invested in just five companies. The first quarter also outpaced the second, which means much of the half's record rested on some enormous deals struck early in the year.

In other words, a record year for venture capital has been a record year for some massive companies. Everyone else is raising in the shadow of it, and it is those overlooked founders that Baden Bower, the PR agency run by CEO AJ Ignacio, is courting with guaranteed placements in named publications.

A crowded top leaves a quiet middle

For the thousands of founders raising ordinary rounds outside AI, the headline numbers can be misleading. Investors, reporters, and customers are all watching the same handful of names, and a company outside that circle has to work harder simply to be noticed.

When attention is concentrated, the first search matters more. A partner who hears about a company is likely to look it up before replying, and a result with nothing credible in it gives that partner one less reason to keep reading. Customers and senior hires run the same search before they commit, and they form their impressions just as quickly.

Those founders are the market Baden Bower is courting. The firm, run by CEO AJ Ignacio, publishes a page for San Francisco tech clients that describes guaranteed placements in titles including Forbes, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and Wired, and promises to return the fee if a contracted article is not published. It reports having placed upward of 25,000 features for 3,548 clients in 37 countries.

Ignacio has made the investor case for coverage directly. "Media coverage attracts the attention of potential investors, venture capitalists, or angel investors," he said in a SWAGGER Magazine feature last year.

The firm is choosy about timing

The San Francisco page is unusually specific about who it thinks is ready. Most of its clients there, it says, start after a Series A round or after reaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue, and its intake team tells each one up front which publications are realistic for the story on offer.

Coverage is built around a funding calendar. Founders brief the agency in writing, its writers draft the piece for the target outlet, and nothing is filed without the founder's sign-off. Turnaround, the company says, is usually under two weeks from sign-off, which allows an article to land alongside a round announcement, a launch, or a hiring push.

Clients then receive the live link and can put the outlet's masthead on their websites and pitch decks.

None of that changes what PitchBook is measuring. Capital is flowing toward AI and toward scale, and an article does not move a company from outside those categories to inside them.

Venture investors also read the press for a living. Many can tell a feature a company arranged from a story a reporter chased, and a piece that sounds like marketing can do more harm than good once it lands in a diligence file.

The guarantee covers publication, not reception. Claims that coverage shortens fundraising generally come from agencies' own client experience rather than independent research.

The narrower case holds up better. A founder with no visibility starts every investor conversation from zero, and in a market this concentrated, a credible article at least ensures that someone who goes looking and finds something.

Editors' patience is the scarce resource

One detail on Baden Bower's page may say more about the long-term health of its model than any growth figure. The company says it spreads each client's coverage across a 12-month plan so that no single editor sees more than one pitch per quarter from the same client to keep relationships healthy across the hundreds of clients it serves in that market.

It is a sensible rule, and a revealing one. A guaranteed-placement business depends entirely on editors continuing to accept its stories. If a record but narrow venture market pushes more founders to buy visibility the same way, the thing every agency in this business will have to protect is the goodwill of the people deciding what runs.