EU-Startups Summit 2026: Top PR & media lessons that work

A panel at the EU-Startups Summit 2026 in Valletta delivered a practical playbook for startup PR, from the friends-and-family headline test to a compelling case for hiring a PR agency. Founders seeking media coverage received a direct briefing from the people who decide what gets published.

The session, titled “The Startup Media Landscape, PR Tips & Tricks,” featured three editors and a moderator guiding early-stage operators through effective strategies, common pitfalls, and shifts over the past year. Panelists included Thomas Ohr, founder and CEO of EU-Startups; Akansha Dimri, founder and editor-in-chief of Tech Funding News; and Alexandru Stan, CEO of TNW. Cathy White, founder of CEW Communications, moderated the discussion on the summit’s main stage at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, an event drawing roughly 2,500 attendees over two days.

The core takeaway was practical. Alexandru Stan argued that founders, particularly at seed and Series A stages, should seriously consider working with a PR agency. His reasoning was clear: major European tech publications face a daily flood of pitches, and a professional experienced in cutting through that noise is often worth the investment. A founder writing pitches in spare hours, he noted, is competing against agencies that pitch the same outlet five days a week and know exactly which journalist covers which beat.

This argument came with a caution. Several speakers warned against over-reliance on AI-generated press releases, which now fill inboxes and often read identically across companies. The advice instead emphasized authentic storytelling: a clear sense of what the company does, who it serves, and why this particular news matters now. Generic announcements, even well-formatted ones, are increasingly easy to spot and easy to ignore.

A related point resonated early: before pitching a journalist, take the time to understand what the publication actually covers. Read recent pieces. Note which writers cover which beats. Send the right story to the right person. The point was simple, but every editor agreed it remains the most common mistake startups make.

Perhaps the most memorable advice was a test for headlines. If a press release headline isn’t strong enough to catch the attention of friends and family, the panel suggested, it’s unlikely to be strong enough for the media. The framing was deliberately low-tech, but it captures something more elaborate PR playbooks sometimes obscure: editors read hundreds of subject lines daily, and the ones they open read like a story rather than a corporate announcement.

The audience reflected the summit’s diverse mix: founders, investors, marketers, agency operators, and ecosystem leaders from across Europe. The conversation focused less on gaming coverage and more on earning meaningful attention without treating media as a shortcut to credibility.

That framing matters because the underlying problem the panel addressed hasn’t gone away. European founders consistently report that coverage of the continent’s companies skews toward the largest markets and most-funded rounds, leaving earlier-stage companies and those outside London, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm fighting harder for visibility. The summit’s choice of Malta and the panel’s choice of audience directly reflected that imbalance.

During the session, journalists on stage also asked Alexandru Stan about his acquisition of TNW from the Financial Times Group, which closed in late 2025. Stan acknowledged the topic but did not disclose further details about the transaction, completed through Tekpon, the SaaS marketplace he founded in 2020.

For founders in the room, the broader message was clear. Coverage is earned. The shortcut,an AI-generated release sent to a scraped mailing list,is now also the most crowded route. The slower path, knowing the publication, finding a story that reads like a story, and writing a headline a friend would click on, is still the one that works.