If a Midwest startup raised $40m and no one knew, did it make a sound?

In the first quarter of 2025, Michigan startups raised a sum total of $562m, delivering one of the best quarters for fundraising in the state over the past two years. Subtract a federal grant for Hemlock semiconductor of $325m, and the best were a couple of +$40m rounds raised by Memryx and Shoulder Innovations respectively.

Both of these were covered by the respective local outlet of Crain’s - a B2B publisher with Detroit, Grand Rapids, Cleveland and Chicago chapters - as well as some industry-specific publications, also known as ‘trade’.

That seems like a reasonable amount of coverage, but there wasn’t much else in either case.

Then, just eight days into Q2, supply-chain software business Optilogic closed a similar sized round… and there were crickets. Save for an exclusive story in Axios linked to the Ann-Arbor, Michigan based startup’s tool which - amongst other things - will help companies navigate the reality of tariffs, almost a month later and that dearth of coverage hasn’t changed.

At first, I figured it may be an anomaly. That, or the Axios exclusive would be followed by embargoed pieces once the agreed period had passed. But, after all this time, that doesn’t appear to be the case at all.

Maybe there are other reasons that such a comparatively large fundraise for this state, in recent history, had not been considered ‘newsworthy’?

Dealroom - where I find the most useful data - lists the company as being based in California, despite the fact that their own LinkedIn page has them in Ann Arbor and most of their staff are in Michigan. Maybe local media and the local Linkedin cheer squads missed the round entirely because they thought they weren’t a local biz?

As is my wont, I dug a little deeper into this, and checked all the businesses in Michigan which Dealroom listed as raising $1 million or more in Q1.

The story was much the same.

Nine of the 13 that fit this criteria had a single item of local coverage. Most had no national coverage either, with the most frequent stories across the board written by industry media. This is common in B2B media. i.e. if you’re in the supply chain business, supply chain media is probably going to talk about you suddenly being flush with cash.

Among the four fundraising rounds missed by local media were AVS Pulse, which raised a $36 million Series B, and CircNova which raised $3.3 million in seed funding. Despite its founding by a University of Michigan research team, AVS Pulse may have more tenuous ties to Michigan; with a dispersed team and HQ (except on Dealroom) listed in Boston. But that’s a topic for another day. Circnova, however, is one of the great stories of not just the local ecosystem, but nationally. It was covered by a ‘local media’ site called City Biz, but with a lede that almost hilariously implied the story had more to do with more Massachusetts connections than those in Michigan: “CircNova, a Michigan startup with offices in Cambridge, Mass., has closed a $3.3 million seed round as it”

So… what if anything, is going on here?

Are businesses in this state just bad at PR? Is there not enough local news media to actually tell local stories? OR are we just not comfortable here in the Midwest with such stories because of a (whisper it) local culture… where we don’t like to brag.

Most importantly, should this apparent lack of local news reporting on local success stories be the norm? And if we don’t believe that to be the case, Can anything be done about it?

Midwest is best right?

Combined, the six states of the Midwest* have a larger total population (53 million vs. 39) and larger combined economy ($4.12t vs. $4.08t GDP) than California. Which, I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone reading this, is the startup epicenter of the known universe and possibly alternate universes as well.

Yet, it wouldn’t be controversial to suggest that businesses in the Midwest are underfunded and under-appreciated when compared with elsewhere. Namely, other states and even other countries. I argued this very point in my last article, comparing Midwest fundraising with the rest of the nation and other ecosystems across the world.

Therefore, inspired by the fact that Optilogic raised $40 million and yet no local, state or national news covered this fairly significant event, rather than assume no one cares or they don’t want to brag, I examined the data across the entire region. *the six states that I refer to as the ‘Midwest’ come from the definition used by the Michigan Venture Capital Association, in their annual report. (So, don’t @ me!)

All fundraising rounds of more than $1 million in Q1 of 2025 were considered, and I looked at how many of them garnered any coverage by local, national or industry-specific (often international) news for that financing.

In general, less than half of all fundraises of this size across Midwest startups during this first quarter received coverage by any local news. National coverage was also non-existent, but this is more understandable as only businesses with much larger funds raised, wider significance or awareness by more of the public would expect to receive any such news. The most common coverage is industry-specific, which makes sense because new technologies can have a direct impact on the readers of these publications, so they’re much more likely to care.

But seriously, this kinda sucks, right?

And it most especially sucks when considering individual stories that deserve to be told, of which Optilogic and Circnova are only two.

To Press Release or not to Press Release, ‘tis the question.

In my experience, startups the world over do a poor job of PR.

In the marketing world that I’m from, we often say that startups have three obvious opportunities to gain almost guaranteed press coverage at any given moment: a big hire, a significant business milestone (revenue or client won)... and fundraising.

These aren’t the only examples, of course, but they are those that even without expert professional support, most businesses should be able to receive. This does require  some planning of course: write a semi-decent story, target the right media, find their contact details, send them an email, LinkedIn message, follow up a few times and more often than not, Bob is your father’s brother.

The last of these, fundraising, is the simplest, lowest hanging fruit.

It is one of the greatest signals that someone sees value in what you’re building. So much so, they’ve reached into their pocket and made it rain. Or written a check. Or wired some money. Whatever. You get the picture: someone likes you.

But many startups mess up the opportunity.

I once worked with a VC firm that managed the fundraising announcements themselves for their portfolio companies, whenever they led a round. They even had a well-known local journalist ghost write the releases (you know who you are). Since hearing this example, I’ve never seen it replicated and I never understood why more funds didn’t take this approach. It was an effective and efficient means of gaining attention and was pretty much guaranteed when managed properly and professionally.

Which brings us back to Optilogic.

I don’t know them, nor had I heard of them when they first popped into my inbox on April 13th. Like all good marketers and as any good practitioner of ‘AI-as-automation’ for simple, yet cumbersome tasks, I have alerts set up based on certain parameters for things I’m looking for or am interested in.

One day, there it was: a golden, shiny $40m Series B. In Michigan. Even better, just down the road in Ann Arbor. ”That’s gotta be one of the largest, non-grant financings this year in the state” I thought to myself. It was. Then I waited for someone to cover it. But, as the story so far goes… Nada.

Not local news.

Not the pay-to-play ‘legacy’ media.

Not the local TV weatherman.

I asked around:

Hey, did you hear about this?

Did I miss something… or has no one talked about this?

Astonishment. Bewilderment.

In the Midwest, I often hear that “we need more early-stage capital” or “we need to financially support our local success stories” and even “we should champion local entrepreneurs more often”. So we wait for moments like this. Then when they arrive… and nothing happens.

BUY LOCAL. SUPPORT MIDWEST STARTUPS (AND MEDIA)

The numbers don’t lie, but they do whisper. Mostly because almost nobody’s really amplifying them; across six Midwestern states over this first quarter of the year, 57 startups raised at least a million dollars. Only twenty-five - less than half - earned a story from a home‑state outlet.

That number alone should make founders uneasy.

Startups can live or die on attention (or distribution, as we marketers are calling it these days). Users, hires, and future investors all follow the best stories. If even the local paper doesn’t seem to care about a relatively large Series B, how many other potential allies will miss out on a significant moment in your business journey?

Michigan looks healthy in comparison with its neighbours: nine of its thirteen deals received local ink. But look around the rest of the region and the signal drops markedly: Wisconsin and Illinois hover around 30 percent, with the others at 50-ish. With Illinois being the largest state in the region economically and Chicago its richest and biggest city, these numbers can be explained, if not happily. Chicago is obviously a large, diverse city with many global business powerhouses. And the numbers of rounds over $1 million, plus the total of close to $1 billion in funds raised for the quarter, reinforce its status as the epicentre of any nascent, combined Midwest startup ecosystem. But the very fact that one of those missing local coverage was Chicago’s newest unicorn, Nerdio, may be the greatest example of the apparent local indifference that we can highlight in this story.

Across the region, there are some bright spots for local news. In Michigan, Crain’s local outlets do good work. Likewise the American City Business Journals that dot the nation and span all the Midwest states in our analysis.

However a hard paywall for startup ecosystems is the equivalent of a velvet rope around the only microphone at karaoke night. Most founders probably aren’t subscribers to such news outlets, so they don’t hear or read enough about their peers or those they aspire to emulate. They therefore keep quiet about the money they’ve raised because they’ve no idea who to share it with. Local investors assume silence equals stagnation, and the broader public - the next wave of entrepreneurs - hears about next to nothing else save for founder-guru-billionaires on the coasts.

Do you hide your Return Address?

Since arriving in the US, I’ve been witness to a Midwest founder who requested we rewrite the dateline on a press release from “Madison” to “San Jose”, simply because one of their sales reps happened to live there. The thinking is that the ‘Valley brand’ will confer more legitimacy. I’d argue it does the opposite. You’re actually losing one of your biggest advantages: being the most exciting and interesting business in town. The proverbial biggest fish in a smaller pond.

I’ve encountered this personally in my career. I lived in the UK between 2012 and 2016, when its startup ecosystem was experiencing a new and exciting groundswell of momentum. And yet everyone wanted the ear of the local Techcrunch correspondent, not those of my (ex-colleagues by coincidence) from British tech publication, Computer Weekly. More than ten years later and that local coverage has thankfully evolved with local startup media Sifted successfully flying the UK (and European) flags.

The same happened - and even more drastically - in France, where I also lived between 2016 and 2020. I saw first-hand the boom of another local media upstart, Maddyness in covering local success stories, and even had my business covered, as well as personally contributing to the English-language version. The publication went from a ‘nice to have’ to the dominant player in its space within just a few years.

The reason?

As I tried to convince many French entrepreneurs during that period, everyone was desperate during that period for “La French tech” to succeed. They wanted their own local billionaires and startup gurus to admire. So talking about your business, your vision and yourself, allied to the fact that you’re French (or British for that matter) and may have just raised some significant money… and they’ll lap it up. It was true then and remains true now.. Up until that point, any successful founder had had to up sticks and move to Silicon Valley. Sound familiar? That led to many local entrepreneurs having a chip on their shoulder, until building successfully by remaining in the country became a cause célébre, literally. I mean, it’s not like they have a word for entrepreneur anyway.

This situation has been replicated across Europe and other parts of the world. In Denmark you have Tech Savvy, Estonia has Foundme, while for the entire continent it’s EU Startups, and Tech Cabal does the same thing for all of Africa.

These regional ecosystems didn’t wait for the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal to come calling and tell their stories; they built local tech beats that treated those local rounds like national news (although, some context: Sifted is backed by the might of the FT).

Pride, it would seem, compounds in the same way that capital does.

What’s Really Going On

Back to the radio silence in the Midwest. You can see three forces at play here:

- Founders underestimate the value of proactively telling their story. They assume investors will notice a Form D filing or help them promote the round they’ve just participated in. They don’t.

- Newsrooms are thin. But while the beat may be missing, the appetite is not. Local dailies run lean, so the city‑hall reporter may double-up on the tech desk. That isn’t because a $6 million seed is “too small”. It’s because quite often no one wakes up each morning paid to hunt these stories. But give a B2B editor a clear pipeline and I guarantee they’ll devour every fundraising round they can find.

- Midwestern modesty. We’d rather surprise people later than brag now, an instinct that is as old as St. Paul. Or Big Foot. Or Flannel. Or something.

But here’s the catch: all three of these things are solvable.

How to create Cheerleaders-in-Chief (CIC)

For founders: Treat a fundraising round like a product launch. Write a narrative about why it's important and what you’re going to do with the funds. Manually build a list of media to connect with, then follow them up. If writing scares you, hire someone to do it. As added inspiration, here is an analogy: treat this stage of your PR journey as ‘sales to reporters’. Finally, if you think local or industry coverage doesn’t matter, I have one acronym for you: SEO. Backlinks from news sites are still extremely valuable, even in a zero-click, AI-chatbot world.

For investors: Bundle storytelling into the term sheet. One competent writer on retainer pays for itself the first time a portfolio company finally shows up in TechCrunch. And again, backlinks. Plus attention. Plus a well-crafted story. I’ll be happy to explain further, if you feel the need.

For newsrooms: Create a dead‑simple “Deal Desk” form. Ten fields. Automate publishing (to a degree). Let founders feed you scoops.

And for the rest of us: click the local stories you see. Traffic funds these beats. Beats fund more stories. That’s the flywheel we need to propagate.

The Best Alternative: a Dedicated, Regional Voice to be the CIC

The combined GDP of these six states is bigger than California’s. Yet our media footprint is a rounding error next to Silicon Valley’s.

A single, independent outlet, focused on the Midwest could close that gap. Think of it less as a newspaper and more as an amplifier: surfacing Series As from Bloomington, calling out nonsense in Chicago, explaining why a $40 million round in Ann Arbor matters to farmers in Iowa.

Optilogic’s silent $40 million raise is a canary in a coal mine. If no one hears it, nothing changes and it falls in the forest without making a sound. But once we get the blowhorn working so that every founder, reporter, and citizen can tune in, I think we’ll discover the Midwest isn’t that quiet and shy at all. Just like we’ve seen elsewhere. We’ve been talking past each other. Or thinking it isn’t “important enough”. Or too busy actually building.

That’s all cool and it makes good sense. It’s part of the reason why we all like it here.

But I think we can all agree that it’s probably time we rallied together, collaborated and cheered each other on. Isn’t it?