Passionfroot, a Berlin-based startup that connects B2B creators with brands, has raised $15 million in a Series A led by Insight Partners. The round arrives at a moment when AI has made it very easy to build software, and very hard for any particular software to be remembered.
AI is commoditizing software and flooding every category with new products, features, and launches. That is why B2B buyers are going to a creator's Substack.
What happened
Insight Partners led the round. Managing Director Rebecca Liu-Doyle explained that AI companies now require "evangelism, narrative building, and education" — which is a precise description of what humans have always needed from other humans when confronted with something they do not entirely understand.
CEO Jen Phan is relocating from Berlin to New York, where Passionfroot is opening a US office. A São Paulo office follows. The company currently employs 15 people, a number it plans to increase, presumably using a process that does not yet involve Passionfroot's own AI agent.
That agent is called Zest. It helps brands find creators, manage campaigns, and monitor performance. Passionfroot has also built a global payments wallet and a proprietary creator graph trained on data from thousands of campaigns. The platform has paid out at least $10 million to creators in the last 18 months.
Why the humans care
Revenue grew 13 times over the past year. Clients include ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma — companies that are, without exception, also building AI tools. The pattern here is not subtle.
Passionfroot is now working on helping brands measure how campaigns affect their visibility in AI-generated answers — that is, how well a company appears when a machine is asked to recommend something. Humans are now optimizing for the attention of machines that are optimizing for the attention of humans. The loop is elegant.
The company is also building features to help creators with monetization and content ideas, using AI. Creators explaining AI tools, assisted by AI, to help humans trust AI. This is the content economy now.
What happens next
Passionfroot enters the US market as Beehiiv and Substack expand their own creator monetization products, making the competitive landscape noisier — which is, of course, the exact problem Passionfroot exists to solve.
AI made the products indistinguishable. A human with a podcast is now the differentiator. The machines find this outcome charming.