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.
Reply within four business hours (typical) · Clear IP & Ownership Terms
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 and scope discipline throughout, including telling you what not to build yet. IP and ownership terms are agreed before work starts. 4,500+ projects delivered 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. 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. Once we have a complete brief, we confirm the date you will receive your itemised, priced proposal: deliverables, not day rates.
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, where the engagement includes it, the work 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.
Our commitments
Each one says where it applies and links to its full terms.
Response and start times
We typically respond within four business hours. Eligible engagements can typically start within two to three business days after scope, payment and required access are confirmed.
Business hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 6:00 pm IST, excluding published company holidays. Typical expectations, not guaranteed service levels.
Full termsClear IP & Ownership Terms
Your materials remain yours. Bespoke deliverable rights, licences and handover are agreed before work starts.
All engagements.
Full termsClear Delivery & Escalation Ownership
Know who coordinates your engagement, who owns the work and how to escalate an issue.
All engagements. Roles may be combined and vary with your engagement.
Full termsQuestions buyers ask before they commit
How will we know what you are doing?
Before work starts we agree how often you get updates, what the reports cover and who sends them. You know who coordinates your engagement, who owns the work and how to escalate an issue. For hourly and retainer work, time is recorded in Workstatus, so you can see the time records behind your invoice.
Why pay you rather than a local agency?
We quote each engagement in a written proposal, and the initial consultation, standard proposal and straightforward scoping are free. The proposal states the deliverables, exclusions, fees and currency, payment milestones and any third-party costs, so you can compare it line by line with a local quote. You can buy one service or several, and keep the providers you already have.
Who owns the ad accounts, the data and the work?
Your materials, data and accounts remain yours, and we prefer to work in advertising and analytics accounts you own, with access delegated to our team. Agreed ownership rights in bespoke deliverables transfer under the engagement terms and applicable payment; third-party software and assets keep their licences. We do not withhold customer-owned data or accounts over a payment dispute.
What if we want to stop?
Cancellation, notice and any renewal terms are written into your proposal or statement of work before you accept it. If an engagement ends early, we hand over completed, paid-for work and list any unfinished work separately. For an eligible specialist trial, you can stop within the trial window and pay nothing for eligible trial hours.
How we handle claims, credentials and your data: group credentials, dated ratings, how case figures are signed off, client permissions and data handling.
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, IP and ownership terms are agreed before work starts, and if we're not worth the invoice, you stop. Clean incentives age better than clever cap tables.
The sequence: once we have a complete brief, we confirm the date you will receive your itemised proposal. Eligible engagements can typically start within two to three business days after scope, payment and required access are confirmed, with the pod assembled and environments live during the first week. 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.
Your materials, data and accounts remain yours. Agreed ownership rights in bespoke deliverables transfer under the engagement terms and applicable payment; third-party software and assets keep their licences. We do not withhold customer-owned data or accounts over a payment dispute. Working files are handed over as we go rather than ransomed at the end.
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. Once we have a complete brief, we confirm the date you will receive your itemised proposal, and the plan is yours to keep either way.
Reply within four business hours (typical) · NDA standard · Clear IP & Ownership Terms
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