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, Replit and Framer.

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

They're going somewhere else. CEO Jen Phan says it's a specialist creator's LinkedIn post, a podcast, or a newsletter on Substack, a platform where writers publish directly to paying subscribers. "AI is commoditizing software and flooding every category with new products, features, and launches," Phan told TechCrunch. "That is why B2B buyers are going to channels like LinkedIn, a creator's Substack, or a podcast on YouTube to discover new products and tools."

Passionfroot runs a marketplace connecting B2B creators, meaning content makers who focus on business 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.

The $15 million Series A was led by Insight Partners, a New York venture firm. Existing backers Creandum, Supernode Global and s16vc also participated. Total funding now stands at more than $21 million. Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch that "AI technology requiring evangelism, narrative building and education" is driving demand on the brand side, while the supply side has people with real expertise who want to make quality content.

Phan is relocating from Berlin to New York as the company opens a U.S. Office. A second office is opening in São Paulo. Passionfroot 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 carries out multi-step tasks without a human guiding each step. Zest helps brands plan campaigns, find suitable creators inside and outside the platform, then track how those campaigns perform. A payments wallet lets brands pay creators anywhere in the world and monitor spending in one place.

Passionfroot also 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 working on a tool to measure how often a brand gets mentioned in AI-generated answers from chatbots like ChatGPT, which is becoming a marketing goal as buyers use AI assistants to research purchases.

What does this mean for creators?

For people making content aimed at professional audiences, brand budgets are moving their way. Passionfroot is also planning tools to help creators with monetisation and content ideas, though those features aren't yet live. As we reported on 20 July, YouTube is already cutting payments for AI-generated content, which makes platforms rewarding genuine expertise look more valuable by comparison.

Competing platforms aren't standing still: Beehiiv launched a new ad marketplace last week, and Substack has introduced subscriber-only perks. Passionfroot's bet is that a dedicated B2B marketplace with matching tools and a global payments layer gives it something those general platforms can't easily replicate. Whether a 15-person team can hold that ground as bigger players notice the same opportunity is the real question to watch.