Region
Service
Sector
Opal is a platform that decentralizes access management for enterprise customers and enables them to manage employee access. By decentralizing access management away from bottlenecked teams like Security and IT, Opal empowers organizations to grant access more selectively, which lessens their attack surface and compliance burden.
Opal launched their platform with $10M Series A funding round led by Greylock to protect enterprises from over-provisioned access. To help create noise among the Global English Media, PRLab was tasked with sharing the funding announcement. The objectives of this collaboration included helping Opal to increase their brand awareness, build credibility, and create buzz around Opal’s Series A funding round. A key challenge would be to gain the attention of top tier media outlets from across the US and UK, as Opal was relatively unknown in these regions. We wanted to ensure that Opal's funding announcement generated enough media hype from which added relationships, for lead generation purposes, could be built with potential investors and lucrative clients.
We set out right away to make ourselves acquainted with Opal's team and got to work - specifying key messages to include in the press release and identifying alternative USPs to build editorial stories from. Conjunctly, the PR team developed an extensive media list to pitch the funding announcement to. The list was crafted to include journalists and publishers from trade media, those covering startup news and/or early-stage funding, as well as including top tier media houses. Once the media list and press release were both ready to go, we tailored pitches and also crafted different versions of the funding release to match the respective media's interests.
While our collaboration originally focused on Opal’s Series A Funding announcement, we extended the collaboration while waiting for some internal edits. During this time we were able to secure additional media opportunities which included an editorial piece for Compare the Cloud, an editorial piece for Global Banking & Finance Review, a CEO interview with Tech Round, and a podcast interview with em360. As a press release is usually short lived after the hype dies down, these additional opportunities were valuable to ensure longevity of Opal's media presence and to usher in the opportunity for continuous coverage.
With the extra time we had available in our collaboration, we introduced Opal to our existing media contacts from the Tech space and focused our efforts towards building journalist relations for future opportunities with valuable trade media sources. For any PR initiative to be successful, the long-term gains need to be taken into consideration. Although our immediate focus was to share Opa's funding news, PRLab worked on laying the foundation for future PR activities as well. With this in mind, we reached out to an array of podcast hosts and publishers for interview opportunities.
Normally, it can be quite challenging to land quality coverage for a Series A of $10 Million as it’s considered a small investment by top tier outlets. However, expectations were exceeded on all accounts.
Regions: USA, UK, EU
