Passionfroot raises $15 million to connect B2B brands with specialist creators

Key points

• Passionfroot raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners, announced Wednesday.
• The Berlin-based startup grew its revenue 13 times over the past year, according to the company.
• Passionfroot claims it has paid creators at least $10 million through its platform in the last 18 months.
• The company is opening new offices in New York and São Paulo to expand beyond Europe.
• Clients include AI voice company ElevenLabs, design tool Figma and coding platform Replit.

Here is the problem Passionfroot is trying to solve. AI tools have made it cheaper and faster than ever to build software products, so the market is filling up with similar-looking apps, features and launches all competing for the same buyers. Marketing emails go unread. Ads blur together. Buyers have started tuning out the noise.

So where do they go instead? According to Passionfroot CEO Jen Phan, they go to a specialist creator's LinkedIn post, a podcast episode, or a newsletter on Substack, a platform where writers publish directly to paying subscribers. These are voices people already trust.

Passionfroot runs a marketplace that connects B2B creators, meaning content makers who focus on business and professional audiences, with brands that want to reach those audiences. Think a software engineer who writes a popular weekly newsletter about developer tools, paired with a company that wants that audience to know about its product.

The $15 million Series A, first reported by TechCrunch AI, was led by Insight Partners, a New York venture firm. Existing investors Creandum, Supernode Global and s16vc also participated. Total funding now stands at more than $21 million.

Phan is relocating from Berlin to New York as the company opens a U.S. office. A second new office is opening in São Paulo. The company currently employs 15 people and plans to hire.

Since its last fundraise in 2024, Passionfroot built an AI agent called Zest. An AI agent is software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, without a human guiding each step. Zest is designed to help brands plan campaigns, find suitable creators both inside and outside the platform, and then track how those campaigns perform. The company also runs a payments wallet so brands can pay creators anywhere in the world and track spending in one place.

Passionfroot says it uses what it calls a creator graph, a database built from reach and performance data across thousands of past campaigns, to match brands with the right voices.

The company is also working on a tool to measure something newer: how often a brand gets mentioned in AI-generated answers, the kind you see from chatbots like ChatGPT. As more buyers use AI assistants to research purchases, showing up in those answers is becoming a marketing goal in its own right.

What does this mean for creators?

For people who already make content aimed at professional audiences, this is a signal that brand budgets are moving toward them. Passionfroot is also planning tools to help creators with monetisation tips and content ideas, though those features are not yet live.

Creator platforms broadly are competing for this moment. Beehiiv, a newsletter platform, launched a new ad marketplace last week. Substack has introduced subscriber-only perks. Passionfroot is betting that a dedicated B2B marketplace, with matching tools and a global payments layer, gives it an edge none of those general platforms can easily copy.