Berlin-based Passionfroot has raised $15 million in a funding round led by Insight Partners, with the money planned for expansion into the U.S. and Latin American markets. Co-founder and CEO Jen Phan is relocating to New York, where the company is opening a U.S. office, alongside a second new office in São Paulo, Brazil. Existing investors Creandum, Supernode Global, and s16vc also participated in the round, bringing Passionfroot's total funding to more than $21 million since its first round closed in December 2021. The company's previous raise was a $3.8 million seed round reported in October 2024. TechCrunch

Passionfroot runs an online marketplace that connects companies with creators — people who write newsletters, make videos, or post on social media about professional topics. The companies pay these creators to promote their products to targeted audiences. Passionfroot's clients include ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma, most of which make tools for software developers. At the time of the funding announcement, the company had 15 employees. Revenue grew 13x over the last year, and the platform has paid out at least $10 million to creators in the past 18 months.

The platform's standout feature is a large database of information about how well different creators perform — how many people they reach and how effective their campaigns are. That data feeds an AI tool called Zest, which helps brands create campaigns, carry them out, track results, and find the right creators for their goals. A payment feature handles sending money to creators in different countries while letting companies see exactly what they are spending.

Passionfroot is also building tools to address a new question in marketing: how do campaigns affect a brand's visibility inside AI-generated answers? When people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI overviews a question, these tools generate responses by pulling information from across the web. Companies now want to know whether sponsoring a creator's newsletter or video changes how their brand shows up in those AI answers. Passionfroot plans to extend its AI tools to creators as well, with features to help them figure out how to earn money and come up with content ideas.

Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, commented on the deal. TechCrunch

The broader context here is that the world of B2B creators — people who make content for professional audiences rather than the general public — has grown up alongside changes in how people find and judge software. Newsletters, YouTube channels, and LinkedIn posts focused on developers have become important channels that software companies rely on as a core part of their marketing, not just an extra. Passionfroot's client list reads like a who's-who of recent developer tools, and the 13x revenue growth suggests that demand for this kind of matchmaking between creators and companies is accelerating quickly.

The move to measure AI citation impact is worth flagging. As AI tools increasingly shape how people find information online, the question of whether a sponsored campaign changes how a brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI overviews is becoming something marketing teams want to measure. Passionfroot is positioning itself to answer that question using data from its campaigns, which would add a new layer of value beyond simply connecting creators with companies and handling payments.

The geographic expansion follows a familiar pattern for European startups that have found a strong product and then move key operations to New York to access U.S. business customers. The São Paulo office is less typical and suggests Latin America may be an underserved market for this kind of creator marketing, though the available facts don't explain the strategy beyond the office opening itself.

At 15 people, Passionfroot is spending $15 million across two new offices, AI tool development, and a payment system that already handles a significant amount of international transactions. That ratio of staff to funding suggests a fast build-out, especially since the company is expanding into two new regions at the same time while also building out its AI and measurement tools. Whether that pace is sustainable will depend on whether revenue keeps growing as the platform moves beyond its European base into markets where it does not yet have the same depth of data on creators.