UN Women Care Accelerator
Media relations for the care-enterprise accelerator and its Demo Day.
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Venture capital · Global
Global press for the venture firm backing emerging-market startups
Running worldwide media relations for Seedstars, establishing it as a prominent player in the early-stage startup ecosystem and supporting the growth of its portfolio companies.
2K+
placements
94
countries covered
5
regions covered
$262M+
estimated ad value
How to read these numbers. Placement counts and audience figures come from the coverage reporting for this programme. Audience figures are publication-level estimates. They can overlap between outlets and do not measure verified readers of an individual article. The published articles are linked below.
Watch
Seedstars in motion.
From the campaign, on the record.
Whose work this is
Michaela's global PR work for Seedstars.
This is Michaela Villaroman's global PR work in her Seedstars role, alongside running MVR. Over seven years, she has handled company announcements, funding news and communications for development programmes across emerging markets.
The named organisations appear in their roles as programme partners, funders, investors or portfolio companies. The experience index links each example to its source.
Background
One story, five regions, one desk.
Seedstars backs founders in markets that global business desks do not cover often, and it does that through funds, accelerators and programmes run with other institutions. The job was to make all of it legible to editors in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America at once, and to keep the story consistent in every one of them.
Coverage landed in TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Forbes and CNBC Africa among others, and the portfolio companies got their own share of it. Over the period, media mentions rose by roughly 186%.
The challenge
Five media landscapes, and no local agencies.
Five regions, each with its own press culture, language and news cycle, all needing attention at the same time. There was no budget to retain a local agency in any of them, so everything ran from one desk and every week meant choosing which markets got the effort.
The harder half was that a large share of the announcements were not company news. They were programmes built with funders, United Nations bodies and development banks, where the wording had to clear several organisations before a single journalist saw it. A sentence about who a programme served could take longer to approve than the pitch took to write.
The approach
Read the market first, then write the pitch.
Nothing here was clever. It was reading each market properly before building a list for it, then doing that again for the next one.
- Each market's press read properly before a media list was built for it
- Pitches written for the individual reporter and the region, never sent in bulk
- Relationships built with journalists before there was anything to ask them for
- One brand narrative held steady across every country it ran in
- Facts, figures and partner roles checked and approved before anything went out
The results
2,000+ placements, 94 countries, five regions.
The work earned more than 2,000 placements across 94 countries and five regions, an estimated $262M+ in ad value, and roughly a 186% increase in media mentions.
Public-interest and development programmes
The programme work behind a lot of that coverage.
A large part of this portfolio was never funding news. It was programme work, run with United Nations bodies, development banks, national agencies and foundations, where Seedstars was an implementing partner and Michaela handled the communications around it.
The clearest example is the care economy work in Asia-Pacific: the UN Women Care Accelerator and the gender-inclusive care entrepreneurship programme that followed it, run with UN Women, Bopinc, SAFEEM, Canada's IDRC and Visa Foundation.
For the 2026 UN Women Care and Climate Entrepreneurship Accelerator Demo Day and donor roundtable in New Delhi, Michaela handled stakeholder coordination, event and participant communications, presentation quality checks, briefing and the post-event communications plan. She also prepared and quality-checked a 29-page internal-review learning brief for the Asia-Pacific care programme, covering programme context, cohort evidence, Demo Days, impact grants and recommendations, and ran the institutional review and approval process around it. That document was an internal-review version, so it is not a published report.
Her role across all of this was communications and the delivery support around it, not designing or running the accelerators themselves: turning programme work into language a journalist or a partner could actually use, handling stakeholder approvals when several organisations shared a programme, coordinating communications around Demo Days, conferences and roundtables, quality-checking briefings and presentations, and writing the learning brief.
The experience index below has 31 selected examples, grouped by category, each with its source. Public-sector and development communications sets out what this experience means for a programme or a bid team.
The experience index
31 examples from seven years of Seedstars PR.
Selected announcements and programmes from Michaela's Seedstars work. Each entry names the organisations involved, explains her role and links to the source.
Development programmes
Gender-inclusive care entrepreneurship
Programme announcement and media relations. IDRC and Visa Foundation funded the programme; UN Women, Bopinc and SAFEEM implemented it.
Source ↗Shan State E-Commerce Hackathon
Press-release preparation, institutional review and media coordination for an e-commerce programme supporting businesses in Shan State.
Source ↗Lab of Tomorrow 17
Media relations for a programme announcement involving GIZ and BMZ.
Source ↗Women's entrepreneurship programme
Media relations for the launch, supporting women-led businesses and entrepreneurship organisations.
Source ↗CAF acceleration programme
Media relations for a startup cohort announcement linked to CAF's acceleration programme.
Source ↗Climate Innovation Lab
Media relations for the climate-technology Demo Day. CTCN is co-hosted by UNEP and UNIDO.
Source ↗Women Entrepreneurship for Africa
Media relations for the accelerator announcement. The EU, OACPS and BMZ supported the initiative; GIZ and the Tony Elumelu Foundation implemented it, with SAFEEM running acceleration.
Source ↗SEED Inclusivity
Media relations for the launch of a programme supporting entrepreneurs with disabilities and assistive-technology businesses.
Source ↗The SUP Challenge
Media relations for Seedstars' role in the single-use-plastic reduction programme, organised by the Incubation Network and PREVENT with ECCA support.
Source ↗develoPPP Ventures
Media relations for the funding call, which DEG Impulse implemented on behalf of BMZ with Seedstars support.
Source ↗SAIS Investment Readiness Programme
Media relations for the investment-readiness cohort announcement.
Source ↗LevelUP Accelerator
Media relations for the announcement of SMEs joining the accelerator.
Source ↗Water Nexus Asia
Announcement communications for the water-focused entrepreneurship programme.
Source ↗Ruta N acceleration programme
Media relations for the announcement of startups receiving follow-on grant funding.
Source ↗Funds and investment
Seedstars International Ventures II
PR for the fund's first-close announcement. The named institutions invested in the fund.
Source ↗Seedstars Youth Wellbeing Ventures
Media relations for the launch of the investment mandate with Fondation Botnar.
Source ↗Financial-services accelerator
Media relations for the accelerator and investment announcement with Krealo, Credicorp's venture-capital arm.
Source ↗Seedstars Africa Ventures
Media relations for a general-partner appointment announcement.
Source ↗Portfolio companies
Mindtera
Media relations for the employee-assistance platform's funding announcement.
Source ↗Eazy Digital
Media relations for the insurtech company's seed-funding announcement.
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Remitee
Media outreach and launch coordination for Remitee's funding announcement through Seedstars.
Source ↗BANIQL
Media relations and broadcast-interview coordination around sustainable nickel and cobalt extraction and the company's seed-funding announcement.
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LogShare
Media outreach and embargo coordination for the logistics platform's seed-funding announcement.
Source ↗Maad
Funding-announcement outreach and coordination of journalist questions for the retail and logistics platform.
Source ↗Shamba Pride
Media outreach for the agricultural-inputs business's funding announcement involving EDFI AgriFI and Seedstars Africa Ventures.
Source ↗Events and partnerships
IOE Migration Challenge
Media relations for the challenge finalists and its finale at the Global Forum on Migration and Development.
Source ↗ANDE Global Conference
Publicly named as ANDE consultant and communications contact for the conference.
Source ↗FT x Cardano Blockchain Challenge
Media relations for the innovation-challenge finale.
Source ↗AfricaWorks and Seedstars partnership
Announcement communications for the partnership bringing together workspace and entrepreneurship networks.
Source ↗Zenith Bank pitching competition
Media relations for the startup competition's winner announcement.
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On the ground
From the campaign.
A look at the work. Hover to pause.
Coverage
Where it ran.
From global business desks to the startup press. Every link is live.
