Company: The Colab
CEO and Co-Founder: Lizzy Harris
Website: https://www.colabcomms.co/
About The Colab
I have sat on both sides of the table, starting in PR in 2011 at an agency, then moving in-house, where I managed the agency. I know what it takes to report the progress of a PR program to your boss, their boss, and the board. My agency reported on activity, using metrics that meant little to our leadership team. Both sides showed me the same thing: the traditional agency model serves neither clients nor the people doing the work.
I founded the business in 2017 as Pipit Communications and relaunched it as The Colab in 2023, when I brought on a co-founder. We built it as the anti-agency: a senior team committed to clear communication, full transparency, and the goals our clients are measured against. We work as an extension of each client team, plugging into their tech stack and adapting to how they operate, from retainer structure to quarterly reporting.
Challenges
During COVID, I lost half my client base in a week. That same spring, new capital flowed into emerging markets and we tripled the business without the headcount to support it. Tariffs later shook our client base overnight, and AI reshaped media and search. Throughout, I have built a business as a woman in an industry where most client leadership teams are men. A more recent challenge has been personal: letting go of control so my team can thrive and I can work on the business instead of in it.
That shift is paying off. The Colab has grown from 2 to 16 teammates across the U.S. and South America, scaled into a multi-million-dollar agency without outside funding, and increased monthly recurring revenue by 322% year over year from 2025 to 2026.
Impact
More than a dozen companies have been acquired or gone public while working with The Colab.
– Qualified: A 90-day project around its $95M Series C generated 43 placements in the first month, including WSJ and Fortune, plus 39 interviews. It grew into a sustained program that continued through the acquisition of Qualified by Salesforce, valued at more than $1.3 billion.
– Lockstep: We launched the AR/AP platform from stealth. Eighteen months later, it was acquired at 50x. Its leadership team now runs new companies, and The Colab is agency of record for all of them.
– The Futurum Group: 86 top-tier broadcast hits in one quarter.
We are also changing what PR can measure. When off-the-shelf tools could not connect PR activity to business outcomes, we built Colab: Prism, a proprietary platform that benchmarks client visibility in AI search and shows how earned media moves those results. Prism also automates tasks like news flagging, briefing docs, and leadership research, freeing our team for the strategy and judgment AI cannot replace.
The Colab is proof that a bootstrapped, transparent, people-first agency can earn the trust of the most ambitious companies in tech and stay with them through their biggest moments.
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