Passionfroot raises $15M to expand its creator marketplace to the US

Passionfroot, a German startup building a marketplace connecting B2B creators with brands, said Wednesday it has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners.

Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, said Passionfroot is well positioned at a time when creators are specializing as AI companies look for more visibility. On the demand side, she said, B2B brands are increasingly relying on creators as AI technology requires evangelism, narrative building, and education; on the supply side, there are people with real market expertise who want to create quality content — which, she said, positions Passionfroot as a true marketplace for B2B creators.

With the funding, Berlin-based co-founder and CEO Jen Phan is moving to New York, where Passionfroot is opening an office to expand its US operations; the company is also opening an office in São Paulo and expanding its current headcount of 15 employees. As AI makes it easier to build products, Phan said, companies are turning to creators to improve brand recall and recognition. “Every head of marketing or growth leader I’m talking to is saying really the same thing: AI is commoditizing software and flooding every category with new products, features, and launches,” Phan told TechCrunch. “It’s incredibly crowded and noisy. 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.”

Phan said the company increased its revenue 13 times over the last year and onboarded clients including ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma. Since its last fundraise in 2024, Passionfroot has released an AI agent called Zest that helps brands create, execute, and monitor campaign performance; Passionfroot says Zest can also help companies find suitable creators, both inside and outside the platform, matched to their marketing strategy. The startup uses a proprietary creator graph built on data about reach and performance from thousands of campaigns, plus a wallet companies can use to pay creators across the globe and track their spending. Passionfroot claims it has paid at least $10 million to creators on its platform in the last 18 months.

The company is also working on helping clients measure how a campaign affects AI citations and how their brand appears in AI-powered answers, and is planning AI features for creators, such as monetization tips and content ideas. The funding comes as creator platforms like Substack and Beehiiv also move to help creators find better monetization: Beehiiv launched a new community and ad marketplace last week, and Substack has introduced subscriber-only perks within newsletters. Passionfroot’s Series A also drew participation from existing investors Creandum, Supernode Global, and s16vc; the company has raised more than $21 million so far.

Why it matters

As AI floods every software category with near-identical new products, B2B buyers are increasingly discovering what to try through creators and personal channels rather than traditional marketing — a shift that could make creator marketplaces a bigger piece of enterprise go-to-market budgets.