The agency for funded startups,
shipping at investor pace.
You've raised, the roadmap is public and the clock is real. One senior team for web, design, brand and AI, without the rewrite debt, vendor sprawl or scope creep that quietly eats runway.
Proposal in 48 hrs · First deliverable in 14 days · You own the IP
PixelCrayons is a digital agency for funded startups: web engineering, design, brand and AI from one senior team, at a cadence investors can see. An itemised proposal within 48 hours, a working first deliverable within 14 days of the NDA, and scope discipline throughout, including telling you what not to build yet. You own every line of code and every design file. 2,500+ projects shipped since 2004.
Judge the record,
not the adjectives.
Outcomes tied to real engagements, not averages.
What burns runway
between rounds.
Five constraints come up in nearly every founder conversation we have. Each maps to how, and with whom, the work gets built.
Ship fast now without paying for it later
Startup speed usually comes at a price named later: the v2 rewrite. The alternative isn't slower delivery: it's senior engineers making boring, proven choices the first time. That means the codebase your next hires inherit is an asset rather than an apology. First working deliverable within 14 days of the NDA; a web layer your future CTO won't want to burn down.
One senior team instead of five vendors
A brand studio, a design freelancer, a dev shop, a marketer and a chatbot contractor: each excellent, none accountable for the whole. Founders end up as the integration layer. One pod covering brand, design and build removes the coordination tax: shared context, one backlog, one standard, and a single person to call when priorities shift on a Tuesday night.
Scope discipline that respects the runway
Every feature has a cost in weeks, and weeks are what you raised. Proposals here are itemised, deliverables and prices, not day rates, and phased so you can stop at any funded milestone with something whole. When a requested feature isn't worth its burn, we say so before building it. That conversation is cheaper than the invoice.
A delivery rhythm you can show the board
Investors don't read commit logs; they read momentum. The cadence is built to be visible: working software demoed at each increment, weekly reporting in plain language, and dates that were sized before they were promised. When something slips, you hear it early, with options, not at the deadline.
An AI story that's more than a pitch-deck slide
Every deck now has an AI slide; fewer products have AI features users keep. We build the ones that survive contact with reality: assistants, workflow automation, retrieval over your own data, scoped tightly, including telling you when a well-prompted API call beats six months of custom modelling.
The startup stack,
routed by problem.
Each service below is its own engagement with its own page: this is where funded teams usually start.
From first commit to first customer.
How the cadence actually runs, scoping, build, demos, handover, is documented openly, and the pricing page shows the engagement shapes before anyone asks for your email.
Start smaller than
a leap of faith.
Straight answer: our published case studies are commerce, SaaS and agency engagements. We haven't published a startup case yet, and we won't invent one. Judge the delivery record, then start with the smallest step that's useful.
See the delivery record
Three published, anonymised engagements with the numbers left in: revenue growth, organic growth, delivery velocity. The same senior bench builds startup products.
See Our WorkGet the free website review
A senior strategist records five minutes on your website: speed, search rankings, AI visibility, conversion leaks. Yours to keep, no strings.
Get a Free Website ReviewScope the build
Tell us the roadmap and the runway. You'll have an itemised, priced proposal within 48 hours, deliverables, not day rates, and a first working deliverable within 14 days of the NDA.
Get a ProposalRunway makes
sequencing everything.
The constraint that shapes startup work is not budget size: it is that the budget has an expiry date, and the plan has to produce evidence before it arrives.
Every plan is judged against the runway clock
A programme that compounds beautifully over eighteen months is the wrong plan for a company with nine months of cash, however sound it is in isolation. Sequencing toward early, checkable evidence matters more here than optimising for the eventual best outcome.
The positioning may still be moving
Before product-market fit the thing being marketed can change underneath the marketing. Deep content built on a positioning that shifts is expensive waste, so the early plan favours channels that adapt quickly over ones that compound slowly.
The audience may not be searching yet
A genuinely new category has no established search demand, which makes SEO a poor first channel regardless of execution quality. Demand has to exist before search can capture it, and saying so early saves a quarter of misdirected effort.
Investor timelines are a real input
Board meetings and funding milestones set hard dates the plan has to serve, and the metrics that matter for a raise are not always the ones that matter for the business that quarter. Being explicit about which a programme optimises for prevents an uncomfortable conversation later.
Scope discipline beats breadth
The common failure is spreading a small budget across every channel so none is funded enough to work. One channel funded properly beats four funded partially, and choosing which is the highest-value decision in the engagement.
Your engagement, week to week,
in one workspace.
Whatever your sector, the engagement runs in one Prism workspace you log into: requests, approvals, tasks and the weekly review, with each decision recorded.
- 01
Requests and approvals
One queue, one owner, one due date.
- 02
Weekly review
Each decision recorded, with the expectation attached.
- 03
Actions checked against outcome
What we did and what happened, side by side.
Frequently
asked.
Sometimes: the filter is budget certainty, not the name of your round. Engagements are cash-based and scoped in phases, so the realistic minimum is a first funded milestone you can afford without betting the company. If that's not yet you, take the free website review anyway: it costs nothing, and the fix list is yours to execute with anyone.
No. Equity-for-services deals blur exactly the accountability you're paying a startup growth agency to provide: we'd be marking our own homework as part-owners. You pay cash against an itemised scope, you own everything produced, and if we're not worth the invoice, you stop. Clean incentives age better than clever cap tables.
The sequence: an itemised proposal within 48 hours of the first call, the pod assembled and environments live during the first week, and a working first deliverable within 14 days of the NDA. What we won't do is start writing code on day one to feel fast: a few days of scoping is what makes the following months quick.
As their bench, not their replacement. You keep architectural authority; the code lives in your repositories from the first commit; and the pod plugs into your review process rather than around it. Founders usually keep the decisions they care about and hand us the throughput, and everything is documented so your future in-house team inherits context, not chaos.
You do, from day one. Repositories and accounts in your name, IP assignment written into the contract, working files handed over as we go rather than ransomed at the end. No proprietary frameworks, no licence-back clauses: if we part ways, any competent team picks up where we left off. That's deliberate: lock-in is a landlord's business model, not an agency's.
One channel funded properly, sequenced toward early, checkable evidence before the runway ends. Before product-market fit, the plan favours channels that adapt quickly over ones that compound slowly. If your category is genuinely new and nobody is searching for it yet, SEO is a poor first channel, and we'll say so.
Ship the roadmap
you raised on.
Tell us what you promised your investors and by when. You'll have an itemised proposal in 48 hours and a working first deliverable within 14 days of the NDA, and the plan is yours to keep either way.
48 hrs proposals · NDA standard · You own the IP
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