How 161 recently funded startups describe themselves on their homepage
We read the homepage headline and first paragraph of 161 startups that raised a seed, Series A or Series B round in the last year. Most say what they do somewhere. Far fewer say it first.
- of H1s are a slogan, not a description
- 51%
- name themselves and say what they do, up top
- 19%
- name who the product is for
- 25%
- send no H1 to a crawler that skips JavaScript
- 16%
Every H1 we could read, 129 in all, listed alphabetically. 63 describe the product and 66 are slogans. The full list is in the dataset.
The short version
Of the 154 homepages that loaded, 68% say what the company does somewhere in the headline or first paragraph. That sounds fine until you look at how. 51% of the H1s we could read are slogans, only 25% name who the product is for, and just 19% open with a sentence that names the company and says what it does. In our audit of 110 established SaaS homepages, the same check found 21%.
Another 16% sent no H1 in their HTML at all, and 17 sent neither a headline nor a paragraph. Their copy only appears after JavaScript runs, which most AI crawlers never do.
Where the answer is, or isn't
Five real openings, exactly as a crawler receives them: the H1, then the first paragraph. We marked the words that tell you what the company does.
-
Defines itself, by name, in the first sentence.
Your AI coworker for Slack
OpenTag is an AI coworker for Slack that uses your company knowledge and connected tools to answer questions, complete tasks, and automate recurring work.
OpenTag, AI, Seed
-
Names itself and says what it does.
Turn missed hotel calls into paid bookings.
Codyco answers around the clock, resolves guest requests, takes payments, and writes every confirmed booking directly into your PMS.
Codyco, AI, Seed
-
The answer is in the paragraph, without the name.
Your providers, in-network. Without the headache.
Stop losing revenue to credentialing delays. We handle documentation, payer submissions, and follow-ups so you can focus on patients.
Arctic Health, Health, Seed
-
The answer arrives in the third sentence.
Ship more. Break less.
Software is now built by AI and run by AI. Dash0 is how you stay in control. We watch the agents writing your code, see everything happening in production, and fix problems automatically, often before anyone notices.
Dash0, Devtools, Series B
-
Nothing to mark.
AI transformation that pays off.
Less busywork. Lower costs. More room to grow.
Ontora, B2B SaaS, Seed
Saying something is not the same as saying it first
Of the 154 homepages that loaded, read by hand. Each line asks the opening to be a little more specific, and each line loses companies.
- 104 say what the company does 68%
- 93 name the kind of product 60%
- 38 name who it is for 25%
- 37 name themselves and say what they do 24%
- 27 name the product and the buyer 18%
45
The plain version already exists
42% of meta descriptions open with the company doing something concrete. 45 companies write that sentence for search results, then leave it off the page.
- Dash0 homepage H1
- Ship more. Break less.
- Dash0 meta description
- Dash0 is modern OpenTelemetry Native Observability, built on CNCF Open Standards such as PromQL, Perses and OTLP with full cost control
The new buzzword is AI
38% of homepages use at least one stock phrase in the title, meta description, H1 or first paragraph. The bigger tic is AI itself: 33% of H1s mention AI or agents, and 44% of openings do. Each phrase below is set in proportion to how many homepages use it.
- platform 22 of 154
- AI-native 11 of 154
- agentic 7 of 154
- AI-powered 7 of 154
- transform 6 of 154
- end-to-end 5 of 154
- intelligent 4 of 154
- unlock 3 of 154
- 10x 2 of 154
- all-in-one 2 of 154
- modern 2 of 154
Once each: cutting-edge, effortless, next-gen, reimagine, revolutionize, seamless, state-of-the-art, unified.
Headlines are short. That isn't the problem.
The median H1 is 6 words. Short and specific works ("Nuclear data centers at sea"). Short and vague is where most of the slogans live: they are spread through the same lengths as the descriptions.
| Words | H1s |
|---|---|
| 1 to 3 | 18 |
| 4 to 6 | 63 |
| 7 to 9 | 37 |
| 10 to 12 | 6 |
| 13+ | 5 |
By category and round
Read the splits as directional: each category has about 22 homepages, and only 13 are Series B. The highest category in each column is in bold.
| Group | Homepages | Says what it does | Names the product | Names the buyer | Slogan H1 | No H1 in HTML |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 22 | 45% | 41% | 27% | 72% | 18% |
| Fintech | 21 | 76% | 76% | 29% | 29% | 19% |
| Devtools | 23 | 74% | 61% | 13% | 45% | 13% |
| Health | 22 | 77% | 73% | 27% | 44% | 18% |
| Climate | 23 | 78% | 70% | 30% | 56% | 22% |
| Consumer | 21 | 62% | 52% | 14% | 47% | 19% |
| B2B SaaS | 22 | 59% | 50% | 32% | 62% | 5% |
| Seed | 102 | 69% | 57% | 26% | 50% | 22% |
| Series A | 39 | 64% | 67% | 18% | 51% | 5% |
| Series B | 13 | 69% | 69% | 31% | 58% | 8% |
What this means for your homepage
A funded startup's homepage gets read by investors, candidates, customers and now answer engines, often in that order. All of them need the same two facts first.
- Say the category and the buyer in the first two lines. If the H1 is a slogan you love, the paragraph under it does the explaining.
- Write one sentence with your name as the subject. "Acme is a..." or "Acme reconciles..." gives an answer engine something to lift as it stands.
- Move your meta description onto the page. Many of these companies already wrote the plain version for search results.
- Make "AI" do some work. Using AI is no longer a category. Say what the AI does, and for whom.
- Ship the headline in the HTML. If your H1 and first paragraph only appear after JavaScript runs, most AI crawlers see nothing.
Three openings, rewritten
From the sample, names removed. Every fact in the rewrite comes from the company's own homepage.
-
A health startup, seed
- Before
- Radiology built to keep up.
- After
- [Company] is a radiology practice for hospitals and imaging centers. Send us your studies and get signed reports back in minutes.
-
A logistics startup, seed
- Before
- More loads. Same team. Higher margin.
- After
- Back-office automation for freight forwarders. [Company] plugs into your TMS, email and portals, runs the repetitive work and escalates only what matters.
-
A fintech startup, seed
- Before
- Our Mission
- After
- Working capital for AI data vendors. [Company] funds the teams that sell training data, evals and RL environments to frontier labs.
This is the work our brand strategy projects start with. More on how we write it in how we approach copy, and how established SaaS companies compare in our audit of 110 SaaS homepages.
How we did it
The sample mixes two public sources. Seed: companies from Y Combinator's Fall 2025, Winter 2026, Spring 2026 and Summer 2026 batches, put into seven categories from their directory listing and drawn in a fixed pseudo-random order, 15 per category. Series A and B: 8 rounds per category announced in the same 12 months (the ones we could confirm all fell between March and October 2026), found in public funding announcements and checked one by one. The full source list is in the dataset.
For each company a script made one request for the homepage, with no logins, no retries and no JavaScript, and a user agent that named us. From the HTML it kept the title tag, meta description, first H1 and first real paragraph. 7 homepages refused the request or failed to load, so homepage figures use the 154 that did.
We read every H1 and first paragraph by hand and labelled whether the H1 is a slogan or a description, and whether the opening says what the company does, names the kind of product and names who it is for. The "names themselves and say what they do" figure in the hero is the automated check from our SaaS audit, so the two studies compare directly. Against our hand reading it agreed on 140 of 154 homepages (91%), with 3 false positives and 11 misses. About half the misses name the company in the H1, which the check does not read for that pattern; the rest put the name later in the paragraph or in a longer form ("Hedge Insurance"). So treat its figure as a floor. Buzzword counts are exact word matches.
One snapshot, fetched on October 18, 2026 from India. YC companies are over-represented at seed, so read the round splits as directional.
