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.
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.
Seedstars in motion.
From the campaign, on the record.
Michaela's global PR work for Seedstars.
This is Michaela Villaroman's PR and earned-media work for Seedstars, the venture firm backing startups across emerging markets. She has run that press programme for seven years in her own capacity, alongside MVR. It sits in the portfolio because the experience is relevant, not because it is an MVR client engagement.
Seedstars is not an MVR client, and neither are the funders, United Nations bodies, development banks, foundations and partner organisations named further down this page. Each had its own role as a funder, implementer, investor or event collaborator in a Seedstars programme or announcement where Michaela handled the communications.
The figures below come from that programme's reporting. Audience and ad-value numbers are estimates, not verified readership.
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%.
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.
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
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.
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. Seedstars collaborated with UN Women and Bopinc on the UN Women Care Accelerator, which supported women-led and women-benefiting care enterprises through acceleration, mentoring, networks, investment exposure, visibility and a Demo Day. A later gender-inclusive care entrepreneurship programme followed, implemented with the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, SAFEEM, Bopinc, Canada's IDRC and Visa Foundation. It ran a ten-month business acceleration programme alongside knowledge exchange, access to networks and finance, and work with public and private stakeholders.
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. In practice that meant PR and earned media across the seven-year portfolio, 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.
Other programme and institutional contexts in the same portfolio, each with a published Seedstars source that names her for media:
- GIZ and BMZ, Lab of Tomorrow 17
- African Development Bank through AFAWA, with GrowthAfrica
- CAF, Development Bank of Latin America
- CTCN climate innovation programme, co-hosted by UNEP and UNIDO
- International Organisation of Employers, Migration Challenge at GFMD 2024
- ANDE at the Aspen Institute, 2024 Global Conference in Bangkok, where she is named as ANDE consultant and communications point of contact
The organisations above appear as programme partners, funders, implementers, investors or event collaborators in Seedstars work. Public-sector and development communications sets out what this experience means for a programme or a bid team.
From the campaign.
A look at the work. Hover to pause.
Where it ran.
From global business desks to the startup press. Every link is live.
