Summarize with AI
A startup press kit page should hold five things a reporter can take without asking: your logo in versions that work on light and dark backgrounds, two or three founder photos at print size, short and long founder bios, one boilerplate paragraph with the basic facts, and the name of a person who answers press email. Put it on its own public page, link it from the footer and from every announcement, and keep every file one click away.
This matters more than it sounds. A press kit is the one page where a stranger publishes your brand for you. The reporter picks the logo, the photo and the sentence that describes your company, and readers judge you from what she picked. On the day your raise or launch is covered, that article is the version of your company most people see first, and your homepage is a click further away.
The white logo that vanished on a white article page
Picture an example. An AI startup that reads vendor contracts for procurement teams has just closed its seed round. A reporter at a tech outlet is writing the story at four in the afternoon and needs to file by six. She has the founder's quote from the call. She needs a logo and a photo.
The site has no Press link in the footer. She right-clicks the logo in the header and saves it. It is an SVG with a white fill on a transparent background, because the header is dark navy. She drops it into her publishing tool, which shows images on a white page. The logo is gone. What is left is an empty rectangle with a thin grey border.
For the founder photo she goes to LinkedIn. The best she finds is a square crop, small, with the edge of someone else's shoulder in one corner from what looks like a wedding. She emails the generic hello address on the contact page and asks for a high resolution logo. Nobody answers before six.
So the story runs with a screenshot of the homepage hero instead of a logo, the cookie banner still across the bottom of it. The company description comes from an old directory profile that still calls the product an AI legal assistant, which was the pitch two pivots ago. Nobody did anything wrong. The reporter used what she could reach.
What the founder does the next morning
He shares the article on LinkedIn, then spends the next hour in his own comments explaining that the company now sells to procurement, not to law firms. He messages the designer who made the logo and gets back a Figma link that the reporter could never have opened. He makes a folder in the shared drive called Press and puts one PNG in it.
Two weeks later a podcast producer asks for a headshot and a short bio. He writes a new bio from scratch in the reply, a third version, different from the one on the about page and the one in the deck.
That is the gap this post is about. You know your product and nobody else does. A press kit is how you hand a stranger the exact words and images you would have chosen, so she does not have to guess under a deadline.
Why the press page outranks your homepage in coverage
Most advice treats the press kit as a PR task: a zip file someone emails on request. That gets the job wrong. The kit is a design job, and on a funding day it does more for how you look than the homepage does, because the homepage only shapes the people who visit it, while the kit shapes every article, newsletter and podcast page that writes about you.
Those pages stay up. For months after a raise, the funding story is one of the things people find when they search your name: the candidate you want to hire with the new money, the buyer doing diligence before a first call, the investor you will meet for the next round. The median gap from seed to Series A is around 616 days across all sectors, and roughly 70 percent of seed companies never raise a Series A at all. The story of your last raise is part of the case for the next one. It should not show a broken logo.
If you have just raised, the press page belongs on the same list as the rest of the site work in website design after a seed or Series A.
Logo files: four versions and one rule
The logo section is where most kits fail, and the failure is always the same one: a single file that only works on the background it was made for. Give four versions, each as SVG and as a PNG with a transparent background.
- Full colour on light. The default for white article pages and most newsletters.
- Reversed, in white, for dark backgrounds. Label it clearly, so nobody pastes it onto white by mistake. Show its preview on a dark tile, not on the page background where it disappears.
- One colour black. Some outlets print in greyscale, and some slide templates need a flat mark.
- The square icon on its own, for avatars, podcast tiles and the small square image social cards use.
Then add one rule in plain words under the files: the minimum clear space around the logo, and one thing never to do with it, such as stretching it or placing the colour version on a photo. One rule gets read. A twelve page brand guideline PDF does not. If your logo, name and colours are still settling, sort that first; branding for AI startups covers what to fix before you hand files to anyone.
Founder photos that survive any crop
Reporters crop. A photo that looks good as a wide banner can lose the founder's head as a square, and the reverse. Give at least one landscape and one portrait shot of each founder, plus one of the founders together, each at least 2000 pixels on the long side so it holds up in print and on a large screen.
Shoot them against a plain background with room around the head, so any crop still works. Name the files with the person's name and role, like jane-doe-ceo.jpg, so the right face ends up next to the right quote. A photo taken on a phone in good daylight beats a cropped event photo every time.
Then write each founder bio in two lengths: one sentence for a caption, and a short paragraph for a profile or a podcast page. Say the role, what the person did before that matters to this company, and nothing else. A reporter will copy the length she needs. If she has to cut your bio, she will cut the part you cared about.
The boilerplate paragraph and the fact sheet
The boilerplate is the paragraph that ends every announcement you write, and it is the one most often copied word for word. Write it once and make it plain. First sentence: what the product is, in the category word your buyer uses, and who it is for. Second sentence: one fact that shows it is real, such as who uses it or what it replaced. Third sentence: where the company is based and who backs it, if you can say so.
Under it, a short fact sheet a reporter can check against her notes: the founding year, the cities the team works from, the founders' names and titles, the round and the lead investor if public, and the customers you have written permission to name. Leave out anything you would not want quoted.
Add four or five product screenshots in light and dark, cropped to the screen that best shows what the product does. That is how a reader who never visits your site still sees the product.
Where the page lives and how people find it
Make it a real page at a plain address, like yourcompany.com/press, not a zip file behind a form or a request email. Show every file on the page with a preview, and add one download for the whole set.
Then link it from the places a reporter looks under deadline: a Press link in the footer, a line at the end of your funding post, and the signature of the email you pitch with. Put a named person and a press email at the top of the page, and make sure someone reads that inbox the day the news goes out. Plan it with the launch, not after it. The design agencies for product launches ranking is a fair place to start if the launch site and this page need outside hands.
Launch week sets the deadline for everything a stranger sees first. When we led brand direction and built the site for Chariot, a speech AI research lab putting its models in public for the first time, it went from kickoff to public launch in seven weeks. A press page is a few hours inside a job like that, and a lot more work after the coverage has gone out without it.
A press kit page you can ship this week
Give it one afternoon, before the next announcement.
- Paste your logo onto a white page and onto a black page. If it disappears on either one, export the missing version.
- Export four logo versions as SVG and PNG, and write one rule about clear space under them.
- Take two founder photos each, landscape and portrait, on a plain background, and name every file after the person.
- Write a one sentence bio and a short paragraph bio for each founder.
- Write the three sentence boilerplate and check that it matches your homepage headline and your LinkedIn company page.
- Build the fact sheet and cut anything you would not want printed.
- Publish it at /press with previews, one download for everything and a named press contact.
- Add a Press link to the footer and to the end of your next announcement.
Then do the test the reporter did. Open the page in a private window, save the first logo you see, and drop it into a blank white document. If it shows up, the page works.
If a raise or a launch is coming and the site still tells the smaller story, fix the site and the press page in the same pass, because a reporter will land on both. Studio Maydit designs websites for AI founders and builds them in Framer, Webflow or custom code, on a fixed scope of three to four weeks or a monthly retainer with no long lock-in. To plan yours before the announcement goes out, book a 30 minute call.
