Out of all the how-to guides ever written about pitching journalists, I’ve never seen one address the truth—that most are simply too busy trying not to get murdered by their inboxes to even open emails. Upbeat wants to use data science to create PR pitches that don’t automatically end up in the Trash folder. The San Francisco-based startup (formerly called PRX.co) launched the public beta of its cloud-based PR platform today and also announced that it has raised $1.5 million in funding.
Upbeat’s investors are Draper Associates, Maverick Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, FirstRock Capital, UpHonest Capital, Quest Venture Partners, SV Angel, 500 Startups, Stanford-StartX Fund, and Y Combinator. Angel investors, including former journalists Esther Dyson and Philip Kaplan, also participated.
CEO Ricky Yean, who co-founded Upbeat with CTO David Tran (the two, pictured above, previously launched Crowdbooster, which provides social media marketing analytics), said that it has worked with more than 300 companies so far.
Not surprisingly, a lot of its clients are other tech startups, but its customers have also included non-profits, activists, writers who have self-published books (the author of Bible Emoji was a client), and conferences like Emojicon, which was organized by former New York Times journalist Jennifer 8. Lee.
Yean said that many of Upbeat’s users usually would not seek a PR agency, but they have also included at least one large company with an in-house communications team.
“What’s interesting is by reducing the friction of engaging a PR agency, we make it easier for all kinds of stories to bubble up to the surface,” said Yean in an email interview. “For example, Uber’s former Head of Compliance started an initiative called the Vendor Security Alliance, and although he was inside Uber, he needed on-demand, extra PR support from the outside and so he came to us, resulting in WSJ coverage. The initiative may not have surfaced otherwise from within the organization.”
While Upbeat’s cloud-based software relies on data analysis to figure out…