- Berlin’s Passionfroot raised a $15 million Series A led by Insight Partners, taking total funding past $21 million.
- Jen Phan, the co-founder and CEO and a former venture investor, is moving to New York to lead Passionfroot’s expansion in the US.
- A reported investor in Passionfroot’s seed round was an employee from Anthropic, and now Insight Partners is backing both companies.
Before starting Passionfroot, Jen Phan worked for years as an early-stage investor at btov Partners, a European VC firm. In 2020, during the pandemic, she started a newsletter and community for tech professionals with immigrant backgrounds and began thinking about leaving investing. She ended up doing both.
In 2022, she launched Passionfroot, the B2B creator marketing platform, with Lorenzo De Nobili, who had built his own marketplace startup. They started the company after months of talking to creators who earned a living from thought-leadership content but lacked the tools to manage the business side.
The startup just closed a $15 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with continued support from Creandum, Supernode Global, and s16vc.
This brings the Berlin startup’s total funding to over $21 million. Phan is moving to New York to lead the company’s next stage.
“With Passionfroot, we’ve been able to build and scale our creator program in a way that wasn’t possible before. In the age of AI, you need to reach your buyers through voices they already trust – and Passionfroot makes that scalable. What used to take weeks now happens in days,” says Alex Lin, who leads growth marketing at Replit, one of the company’s customers.
Because of her background, it’s a real question whether Phan made the right choice. Venture capitalists at the Series A stage usually look for three things: steady growth, a unique advantage, and a market large enough to support the investment. Now, Phan is using the same standards she once used to judge other founders. This can be a big advantage, but it can also make it easy to miss your own blind spots.
The AI industry is funding its own distribution layer
One of the most interesting details about this round is that Austin Lau, who works in growth at Anthropic, reportedly invested in Passionfroot’s 2024 seed round. Insight Partners, which has backed Anthropic since 2025, is now leading Passionfroot’s Series A.
Many of Passionfroot’s customers, like ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma, are also part of Insight and Anthropic’s AI-focused portfolios. This shows a trend: people and investors in the AI industry are funding the tools that help their own companies get noticed, not just the core technology.
The startup runs B2B creator campaigns from start to finish using an AI agent called Zest. It manages discovery, contracts, and payments through the Creator Graph, a dataset built from thousands of past campaigns that tracks B2B creator pricing and performance. Payments go through the Passionfroot Wallet, which gives brands better insight into creator spending—a level of transparency Phan says was missing before.
“AI-native companies are bringing a consumer playbook to B2B go-to-market. More and more, they’re scaling through creators their audiences already trust, and as generative engines reshape search, authentic user-generated content is becoming increasingly valuable. Passionfroot built the infrastructure for this shift,” says Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners.
Phan puts it this way: “The more AI floods the world with content, the more the trusted human voices — the domain experts and tastemakers people actually listen to — matter. Our job is to make reaching them as measurable and scalable as paid search became fifteen years ago.”
Why she might have picked right, and where it could still go wrong
Passionfroot is not alone in this space. Passionfruit in London raised $9 million last year for a similar marketplace that serves a wider range of clients. Agentio connects YouTubers with brands, and Catch + Release manages licensable creator content.
Phan’s approach is more focused: Passionfroot only works with B2B software companies and relies on AI automation instead of hiring a large team. They run campaigns for over 150 customers with just 15 employees.
This focus is both Passionfroot’s main strength and its biggest risk. Specialising helps the company serve B2B buyers better than general platforms, but it also means Passionfroot depends on continued spending from AI-focused software companies.
If that spending drops, or if bigger platforms build their own B2B creator tools, Passionfroot’s focus could limit its growth.
What the money is for
Passionfroot plans to use the new funding to let Zest manage more parts of each campaign, expand the Creator Graph, and grow its presence as Phan moves to New York. The company will also open a new office in São Paulo focused on customer success and engineering.
As a venture capitalist, Phan always asked founders to prove their markets before she invested. Now, she has to do the same in a market she helped shape, with investors who are also involved in the AI-native companies she targets. If she succeeds, it will show conviction. If not, her close ties to customers and investors will likely be questioned.
Phan’s background makes her investment judgment relevant. Venture capitalists at the Series A stage seek durable growth, a defensible market position, and a large market. Phan is now applying the same criteria to her own company that she once used to evaluate others, which can be both an advantage and a risk.
