A venture studio is a harder communications problem than a fund, because it makes two claims simultaneously.
A fund says: we identify good companies. A studio says: we identify them and we build them. That is the venture studio model in one line: company building combined with venture funding, with the studio acting as a co-founder that often supplies the idea and provides capital, talent and operating support. The build claim is more valuable and much harder to substantiate, because the evidence is the portfolio's operating performance rather than the portfolio's existence.
So a studio lives on two things at once. Its own credibility, which is about its judgment and process, with the founders it wants to recruit and the reporters who cover how companies get started. And portfolio traction, which is about whether the companies are working. Neither substitutes for the other, and a studio that communicates only about itself looks like a fund with extra steps.
Key takeaways
- J.P. Morgan's November 2025 guide for founders lists "What is your track record with previous ventures?" among the questions to ask a venture studio, so portfolio results are part of how founders are advised to judge a studio.
- High Alpha's guide to the venture studio model lists marketing and PR among the services a studio may provide its companies, so studio and portfolio communications can end up drawing on one team and one budget.
What does the venture studio model mean for PR?
Under the venture studio model, PR has to run as two parallel programs with different targets: one for the studio and one for each company it builds.
Studio-level. Fund closes, thesis, leadership positioning, process. Audience is the founders and operators the studio wants to build with. That audience matters more to a studio than to a fund, because a studio often has the idea first and recruits the founder second. Channels are business press, startup and venture trade, and contributed writing that demonstrates operating judgment.
Portfolio-level. Individual company launches, funding, traction, product. Audience is each company's customers and the market. Channels are whatever press serves that company's category, which will differ wildly across the portfolio. A fund's platform team runs into the same thing with portfolio company PR: an introduction only helps when the reporter covers that company's space.
The mistake is running these as one program, usually by folding portfolio news into studio announcements. It weakens both: the studio story becomes a list, and the individual company's story gets buried in someone else's release.
Doing it in a bad market
We ran this for SuperLayer across 2022 and 2023, which was among the worst fundraising environments in a decade and, for a studio backing consumer and Web3 companies, worse than the average.
Markets were down. LPs were cautious. The categories the portfolio operated in were under active scrutiny. Skepticism was the default position of every audience.
The program ran on three tracks simultaneously.
Fund announcements had to land properly. A $25 million fund led by Polygon, including a $5 million strategic investment from Forte, covered in The Block and CoinDesk with wide syndication. In a down market, a well-covered close is evidence that capital still believes.
Portfolio and partner wins carried the proof. A Fast Company feature on the Outerverse, which Outside built with SuperLayer, plus trade coverage for KungFu Beasts, Joyride and Taki. These weren't studio announcements. They were individual companies getting covered on their own merits, which is what demonstrates that the studio's bets were working.
Leadership was positioned as operators rather than promoters. A TechCrunch byline on regulation, CNBC mentions, a predictions piece in Cointelegraph. In a category full of promotion, sounding like someone who builds companies rather than someone who talks about them was the differentiator.
We also built relationship infrastructure deliberately — a Consensus dinner with Axios, TechCrunch, Fortune, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, and five podcast appearances. Relationships built during a downturn are the ones available when the market turns.
Where should a venture studio's PR budget go?
In my view, most of a venture studio's PR budget belongs with its portfolio companies, not the studio.
The pull runs the other way, toward studio-level communications, because that's the entity paying the invoice and the one whose own news feels urgent. But portfolio visibility is the evidence for every studio claim, it serves the companies the studio is building, and it produces the coverage a founder reads before agreeing to build a company with you. J.P. Morgan's guide tells that founder to ask about your track record.
After an announcement, look for a follow-up story backed by operating results: what the company built, who uses it and what customers can document. For a studio, those second stories carry the build claim.
What can a venture studio publish from building companies?
A venture studio has operating data from companies it built itself: what works in early distribution, what a repeatable launch looks like, where companies fail at the same point.
J.P. Morgan counts this among the model's benefits: lessons from each company, whether it succeeds or not, get documented and applied to future ones. Publishing some of that record turns it into evidence of the build claim. High Alpha, the Indianapolis studio, puts out an annual SaaS benchmarks report, drawn from a survey of more than 800 SaaS companies; a studio could pair that kind of survey with what it learned building its own.
For a data campaign, publish the sample, the population studied and who funded the research. A studio publishing its own numbers should also explain how it collected and checked them.
Common questions
What is the venture studio model? The venture studio model combines company building with venture funding. Ideas come from the studio's own team, from founders or from partners, and the studio provides capital, talent and operating support as a co-founder from the idea stage, rather than investing in a company that already exists.
How is a venture studio different from an incubator or accelerator? A venture studio enters at the idea stage and builds the company with its founders. In J.P. Morgan's comparison, an incubator offers mentorship, training and workspace to early teams, then steps back, and an accelerator takes startups that already have a developed idea through a program, usually of three to six months.
How does a venture studio make money? Through ownership in the companies it builds. High Alpha says a studio takes a larger stake than a usual early-stage investment, and J.P. Morgan notes founders sometimes give up as much as 80% of a company for studio resources. The studio's returns depend on how its companies do.
Should portfolio news be folded into studio announcements? Generally no. It reduces the individual company's story to a line item and turns the studio's story into a list. Separate programs work better: the studio speaks to founders and the reporters who cover company building, and each company speaks to its own market.
What proves a venture studio's model is working? The operating results of the companies it built. Coverage of those companies in their own categories, under their own names, makes the results visible to the founders and reporters a studio wants to reach.
Sources
- J.P. Morgan, Understanding venture studios for startups, November 17, 2025
- High Alpha, What is a Venture Studio?, accessed November 2026
- High Alpha, 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report, November 2025
Salient PR partnered with SuperLayer from 2022 to 2023 on fund announcements, portfolio visibility and leadership positioning through the downturn.
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