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Ask any founder what keeps them up at night and, product bugs aside, the answer is often the same: nobody knows who they are. Finding the work has always been harder than doing the work, hence marketing departments and budgets, and hence millions spent on advertising, public relations, and professional communications.
Providing you have the millions in the first instance. Most startups are cash-strapped and, certainly but not exclusively in New Zealand and Australia, undercapitalised with every dollar turned over twice before spending. Barney Chunn says that through his own experiences in startup land, public relations proved one of the better cures, but with agency retainers running to five figures a month and commitments of a year or more, the medicine has mostly been reserved for those who can afford it.
That's the gap his new start-up Drumbeat is chasing. "If you become really obsessed with the problem itself, not the version of how it's currently solved, you actually have a really unique ability to rethink the solution from first principles," he said.
Chunn previously co-founded construction tech company CONQA, diving right in though he came from neither construction nor technology. He reckons that distance was an advantage. "When you are a part of the industry, you're typically more closely aligned to a perception of where you are in that industry, and you tend to stick to how things were always done," he explained. That doesn't kill innovation, per se, it just means those too close can't see another way. It's a 'not seeing the wood for the trees' issue, in other words.
Out of reach, not out of favour
The pain, in his telling, is accessibility. "Your options for PR and comms were limited by a high barrier to entry from a cost perspective, or from a 'manual input to do the work perspective'," Chunn said. "If you wanted to get a PR and comms agency or freelancer, you're looking at $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a month."
And that's before the lengthy commitment. "It's not even fully outsourced, is it? They don't know your business like you do, and so you have to continue to translate that outward," he added, quick to note that agency people are "very, very good at what they do". Which they are. But for a start-up, $60,000 to $120,000 a year is capital arguably better deployed elsewhere, particularly when most agencies treasure and chase the holy grail of a retainer.
Drumbeat's answer is a platform built on AI tooling that, Chunn said, drastically cuts the outlay. Pricing has changed over time and will keep changing, he cautioned, but the company is committed to being five to 10 times more affordable than an agency. "So it might be between $1,000 and $2,000 a month, and for that, you get all you can eat," Chunn said. "As many media contacts, as many geographies, as many pitches, as many collaborators on your account. You can create voices and outlets for different execs, for example."
Relevance beats relationships
Could AI-assisted pitching simply add to the flood journalists already wade through? Why, yes, it could. Chunn's argument is that the tooling targets rather than sprays. "The thing that every single journalist that we've spoken to has told us is that the number one thing they care about is the relevance of the story to them," he said. "If your favourite PR person pitched you a rubbish story, your rejection might be nicer and it might come with some feedback, but you're still going to say no."
A timely, relevant pitch from a stranger, on the other hand, still gets a hearing. "We use our AI tools to focus on targeting the story to the media outlet and to the journalist," he continued.
The shape of the media matters too. "They talk about the collapse of the media, but it's really fragmentation of the media," Chunn observed. "There's still a lot of people out there who are publishing great content. They're just sometimes doing it under their own name on a Substack, or they've got a great podcast or a targeted newsletter."
People are reading and consuming content just as much; publishing remains a tough row to hoe, but not because audiences are disappearing. Instead, advertising has evaporated from the business model, and those that cannot find sustainable replacement revenue streams are under the cosh.
The machines are listening too
The company name, it turns out, is the strategy. Chunn recommends a steady 'drumbeat' of targeted content over one-off announcements, not least because AI answer engines increasingly decide who gets found. "When you think about GEO [generative engine optimisation], the citations are weighted towards recency, so they can become stale quickly," he said. "You have to repeat a message, I think it's about seven times, before it starts to sink in with people, and it's almost like the machines are the same."
Market watchers agree, and then some. Gartner predicts that by 2027, public large language models (LLMs) replacing traditional search will drive a two-fold increase in PR and earned media budgets, noting that press releases attract the fewest AI citations. Forrester, meanwhile, warns of a 'visibility vacuum', with 69% of B2B marketers in one of its polls naming AI visibility a top CMO or CEO priority for 2026.
Self-serving for a PR platform? Perhaps. But also, it seems, accurate. Drumbeat launched in March, raised a $2 million seed round led by Icehouse Ventures in September and, Chunn said, now has more than 70 customers across Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK, up from the 50-plus it cited at the raise.
Finally, what stops companies doing it all themselves with the same AI tools? "I think we'll start to see companies still recognise that they are in the business of what they're in the business of," Chunn said. "What's amazing about this technology wave is we're really restricted only by our velocity and our ambition."
The rare and expensive, made common and affordable. That, Chunn reckoned, is what successful tech companies have always done: "We're providing access to something that used to be vaulted and making it more readily available to the businesses that need it."