Highwire Public Relations

Highwire Public Relations

Highwire was co-founded in San Francisco by Borders and Carrubba, both agency veterans who saw a gap in high-stakes technology communications. The firm concentrated on enterprise clients — cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and developer tools — at a time when consumer tech got most of the agency attention. That focus earned it a durable position inside the venture-to-IPO lifecycle, advising companies through funding rounds, security incidents, and market debuts. The firm's mandate spans corporate reputation, crisis, product launches, and executive thought leadership for a client list that has historically included Delphix, Tanium, Contrast Security, and ForgeRock. Highwire operates at the intersection of media relations, analyst relations, and content strategy, often stepping in when a company is too small for a global holding company agency but too complex for a boutique generalist. Its geographic footprint is concentrated in the US, with a San Francisco headquarters and an additional New York office. The agency has grown through organic client expansion and selective acquisitions, including the integration of North Carolina-based Epley Marketing in 2019. The firm was recognized as PRovoke Media's North American Technology Agency of the Year in 2017, reflecting its dominance in the enterprise beat. Highwire's client work regularly puts its principals in front of journalists at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, as well as the trade press that enterprise buyers actually read. In September 2023, the firm merged with Next15-owned agency Bite to form a larger technology communications group, with Borders taking a leadership role in the combined entity (per PRWeek, September 2023). The structural difference is in its vertical architecture. Highwire organized around technology sub-sectors — security, AI, health IT — rather than general geographic or service-line silos. Each practice head operates as a domain specialist who can credibly brief a CIO or a CISO on the record, which aligns the agency with the client's own go-to-market structure in a way generalist firms cannot replicate.