A nuclear startup announces cold criticality. Within 48 hours, the story runs in Bloomberg, CNBC, and TechCrunch. A biotech founder films himself testing a battlefield wound dressing on his own body—and closes a $4.3 million seed round. A preventive health app launches with 150,000 people on its waitlist and celebrity backers from the NBA to Hollywood.

None of these outcomes happened by accident. They happened because the companies behind them had an investor that treats communications as a core function of venture capital—not an afterthought.

That investor is Masha Bucher, founder and general partner of Day One Ventures. In just six years, Bucher has grown the San Francisco-based firm from $11 million in assets under management to mid nine figures million. Her thesis: early-stage founders don’t just need capital. They need someone who can tell their story.

The Perception Problem in Frontier Technology

Deep tech companies face a challenge that SaaS startups and consumer apps do not. Their products are complex, their timelines are long, and the sectors they operate in—nuclear energy, defense biotech, autonomous mining, climate technology—are shaped as much by public perception as by technical performance.

A nuclear reactor can be engineered to perfection, but if the public associates nuclear energy with disaster rather than decarbonization, regulatory headwinds will stall deployment. An enzyme that breaks down plastic at room temperature is a scientific breakthrough—unless no one outside a lab knows it exists. A hemostatic dressing can save lives on the battlefield, but if the company behind it can’t articulate the problem it solves, defense procurement officers won’t prioritize it.

“The structure of PR services is very misaligned,” Bucher told TechCrunch in a December 2025 interview, noting that PR firms on contract often lean toward working slower to stretch out client payments. “For startups, it’s really important to move fast.” She added: “Early-stage companies shouldn’t be paying $10, $20, or $30 grand per month for six months to get one announcement in TechCrunch. I just don’t think that’s fair, and I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

This is the gap Bucher set out to close when she founded Day One Ventures in 2018. Rather than offering PR as an external service, she embedded it directly into the fund. Every portfolio company receives hands-on communications support—press strategy, media outreach, product launch messaging—as a standard part of what it means to have Day One on the cap table.

How Communications Creates Value in Deep Tech

The model works differently depending on the company and the moment. For Valar Atomics, which raised a $130 million round with Day One co-leading, the communications strategy turned a technical milestone—cold criticality—into a narrative about American energy independence, generating coverage in Bloomberg, CNBC, and TechCrunch within two days.

For Epoch Biodesign, Day One helped position the company’s $18.3 million Series A at the intersection of climate tech and fashion—connecting a biorecycling enzyme breakthrough to the 40 fashion and automotive brands already partnering with the company. For Superpower, the communications push around its $30 million Series A turned a waitlist into mainstream visibility across TechCrunch, Fierce Healthcare, and Endpoints News. And for Pilgrim, a defense biotech startup, the story of founder Jake Adler testing his own hemostatic dressing became one of the most talked-about fundraising moments of 2025.

“We want to use comms to solve companies’ business goals, unlock new opportunities, and to help them, ultimately, to grow shareholder value,” Bucher said.

Conviction as a Communications Strategy

One of the less obvious advantages of Bucher’s model is the built-in quality filter. Because Day One provides PR as part of its investment, the firm only backs companies whose stories it actually believes in. Bucher has been direct about where she draws the line—pointing to AI startup Cluely’s “cheat on everything” marketing as an example of a company she wouldn’t fund.

“I have an ambition to be, ideally, the first investor in the most important and ambitious ideas and companies of our time,” she said. “That starts with you understanding the field, understanding the business, getting a conviction on the business. And once you have this conviction—which you’ve proved by investing in the company—you have the right to introduce it to reporters with much higher integrity.”

That conviction-first approach has shaped a portfolio spanning nuclear energy, reproductive technology, preventive health, autonomous mining, AI-driven manufacturing, and defense biotech. Day One’s early bets include World, Superhuman, and Remote.com, with at least 16 unicorns and 40 exits to date. 

Why the Model Hasn’t Been Widely Replicated

Given Day One’s results, the natural question is why more venture firms haven’t adopted a similar approach. The answer is partly structural: most VCs don’t come from communications backgrounds, and building an in-house PR function requires a fundamentally different team composition than a typical fund. There’s also an incentive alignment issue. An external PR firm bills by the month, which can encourage slower execution. An investor providing communications support is motivated by equity upside—the incentive is to move fast and generate outcomes, not to stretch out engagements.

For deep tech companies specifically, this alignment matters enormously. A nuclear company’s regulatory environment is shaped by public sentiment. A defense startup’s procurement pipeline depends on visibility with the right decision-makers. A climate tech company’s ability to attract follow-on capital hinges on whether institutional investors understand what the technology actually does. In each case, communications isn’t peripheral to the business—it’s core infrastructure.

Storytelling as a Structural Advantage

Venture capital has always been a bet on people and ideas. But the distance between a breakthrough technology and widespread adoption is often filled not by better engineering, but by better communication. The public’s understanding of nuclear energy, AI, biotech, and climate solutions is shaped as much by narrative as by data—and the companies that control their own narratives have a structural advantage.

Day One Ventures has built its entire model around that insight. With hundreds of millions in AUM, a portfolio captured $250 billion in value, and a track record of 16 unicorns and 40 exits, the results suggest that storytelling isn’t a soft skill in venture capital. For founders building at the frontier—where the technology is complex, the stakes are high, and public perception can make or break a company—it may be the hardest edge of all.

Masha Bucher is the founder and general partner of Day One Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that’s an early investor at 16 unicorns.

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