Nvidia has casually posted a $69.1 billion quarter, Wayve raised $1.2 billion, and Axelera has pulled in a record EU semiconductor round… and you might be wondering whether anyone ever noticed your launch.
You are not competing with these companies on revenue, but you are competing with them for attention. The question isn’t “how do we get Nvidia-sized numbers?” It’s “how do we tell a story that still cuts through when those numbers dominate the headlines?”
The new noise for AI and deep tech
When Nvidia’s annual profit is larger than the GDP of small countries and Britain can point to an $8.6 billion self-driving “scale-up,” the bar for what feels “big” has shifted.
For founders and marketing leads, that creates two dangerous instincts:
- either you inflate your own story to sound as big and important
- or you decide there’s no point in saying anything because you will never look that impressive
Both are wrong. Your buyers, partners and potential hires do not need you to be Nvidia. They do want you to be:
- clear about what you do
- honest about who you are for
- specific about why you matter right now
The good news: those are PR problems you can actually solve.
Why “we do AI too” isn’t a story anymore
In a market like this, “we’re an AI company” is equivalent to “we have a website.” It’s assumed and not interesting.
Look at the companies mentioned:
- Wayve isn’t just “an AI self-driving startup.”
It’s “no HD maps, end-to-end learning from raw sensor data, driven in 500+ cities, licensing software instead of building cars.”
- Axelera AI isn’t just “another chipmaker.”
It’s “inference chips for edge devices, 3x performance per watt, getting into AI warehouses, cameras, cars and robots.”
Those are pointed positions, not labels. The positioning alone does half the PR work before a pitch even goes out.
If your current story could be summarised as “we use AI to help [broad group] do [broad benefit],” then you are already in trouble.
A quick PR checklist for AI & deep-tech founders in 2026 and beyond
Before you brief your PR team or publish your next announcement, ask yourselves these questions:
- Can we explain what we do without using the words “AI”, “innovative” or “game‑changing” in the first sentence?
- Is there a single, sharp line that explains how we’re different from the biggest names in our space – and would a non‑technical stakeholder understand it?
- Are we telling stories about problems and outcomes (safety, cost, time, risk), or just about technology and funding?
- Are we targeting outlets and communities our actual buyers read, or just those that look good on a slide?
- If a journalist skimmed our pitch alongside three competitors, is there any reason ours would stick?
If you cannot honestly answer “yes” to most of those, you don’t have a PR execution problem yet. You have a story problem.