The AI Industry Is Funding Its Own Distribution Layer

Austin Lau works in growth at Anthropic. In 2024, he put his own money into the seed round of a Berlin creator-marketing startup called Passionfroot. Eighteen months later, Insight Partners - one of Anthropic’s largest institutional backers - led Passionfroot’s $15M Series A. In between, Passionfroot’s customer list filled up with names like ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma: mostly AI-native companies, several of them also sitting inside Insight’s own portfolio. Nobody planned this as a thesis. It just kept happening, deal after deal, until the money funding the model layer and the money funding the marketing layer turned out to be the same money.

Jen Phan is a Vietnamese immigrant’s daughter, raised in Germany, a third-culture kid from the start. She went the conventional path first: business school, then years as an early-stage investor at btov Partners, a European VC firm, work that later got her a Forbes 30 Under 30 nod. In 2020, mid-pandemic, she started a newsletter for tech professionals with immigrant backgrounds - partly to process a year of Black Lives Matter, Asian hate crimes, and climate anxiety, partly because she loved the act of writing itself. She got serious enough about the creator path that she considered doing it full-time.

What stopped her wasn’t fear. It was arithmetic. Talking to creators about how they actually made money, she kept hearing the same answer: brand partnerships and sponsorships, and how hard it was to monetize any of it well. She decided the bigger lever wasn’t becoming one more creator competing for the same sponsorship dollars - it was building the infrastructure underneath all of them.

Her co-founder, Lorenzo De Nobili, had already built and run his own marketplace startup. The two reconnected as he was leaving his job, bonded over the same read on where creator-driven work was heading, and launched Passionfroot in 2022. They raised a pre-seed from a mix of VCs, founders, creators, and angels, then hired their first product and engineering team.

The company started as a single-player tool: creators used it to package sponsorship deals, invoice brands, and get paid without spreadsheets. Passionfroot didn’t set out to build a marketplace. Creators kept forwarding their Passionfroot pages to the brands and startups they worked with, and those companies started asking Passionfroot directly for access to more creators like the ones they’d just hired. That inbound pull, not a strategy deck, is what turned a creator tool into the two-sided B2B marketplace it is today - one side stocked with vetted creators, the other with the tech companies paying to reach them.

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The clearest single image of what’s happening here isn’t in the press release, it’s in the cap table. Austin Lau, who works in growth at Anthropic, was a named angel in Passionfroot’s 2024 seed round. Insight Partners, which has backed Anthropic since 2025, just led Passionfroot’s Series A. And sitting inside Passionfroot’s own customer list are Figma, Replit, ElevenLabs, Framer, and Gamma - all AI-native companies, several of them also Insight or Anthropic portfolio names.

Line those facts up and you get something unusually literal: the same capital, and in Austin Lau’s case literally the same person, backing both the model layer and the layer that helps the model layer get noticed. Replit’s own growth marketing lead, Alex Lin, put a number on what that’s worth in practice: “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.”

That’s not a case study slide. That’s an AI company saying, on the record, that trust-based distribution has become a speed problem it’s willing to pay to solve - and Passionfroot is the vendor it chose to solve it.

Passionfroot’s $15M Series A was led by Insight Partners, with continued participation from Creandum, Supernode Global, and s16vc - largely the same investors who backed the company’s earlier rounds. That’s its own signal: this isn’t a round assembled from scratch, it’s existing believers doubling down alongside a new lead. Total funding is now past $21M, across a pre-seed, an October 2024 seed, and this Series A. Neither the valuation nor whether the round was oversubscribed has been disclosed.

Rebecca Liu-Doyle, the Insight Partners managing director who led the deal, framed the thesis in market terms rather than product terms: “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.” That’s an investor betting on a channel shift - AI reshaping how buyers discover vendors - more than on Passionfroot’s specific feature set.

Phan’s own framing of the same idea, in her words: “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.” That’s a founder claiming Passionfroot is building a category the size of paid search - a large claim, but a specific and falsifiable one, which is exactly the kind of claim worth checking again in two years.

Mechanically, the product does three things: an AI agent called Zest runs the operational parts of a campaign end to end - discovery, contracting, execution; a dataset called the Creator Graph, built from thousands of past campaigns, prices and scores B2B creators the way an ad exchange prices inventory; and a Passionfroot Wallet handles payment with visibility into creator spend that Phan says brands didn’t have before. None of that is novel infrastructure on its own. What’s novel is applying it narrowly to B2B software companies buying attention from creators, instead of building a general creator-economy tool and hoping enterprise demand shows up later.

The money is earmarked for exactly that narrowing: giving Zest more autonomy over each campaign, deepening the Creator Graph, and funding Phan’s relocation to New York to run US go-to-market, where the bulk of Passionfroot’s customers already sit.

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Strip away the AI-industry-funding-itself narrative and the underlying business still has to work on its own customer math, and there the numbers hold up. Passionfroot runs live creator campaigns for over 150 customers with a team of just 15 people - roughly 10 people as of early 2025, per Phan’s own account, before scaling to support this raise. HubSpot has run close to 150 creator activations through the platform. Tracksuit, a smaller brand-tracking company, used it to reach 1.68 million impressions and generate nearly 2,000 leads across three continents - the kind of multi-region reach a 15-person team could not plausibly deliver by hand. Zain Kahn, who runs the newsletter Superhuman, has credited Passionfroot with turning his brand-deal pipeline from a spreadsheet he dreaded into something he actually manages proactively; Bill Kerr, an independent creator and interviewer, has said much the same, unprompted and without Passionfroot paying for the endorsement.

Passionfroot isn’t the only company chasing this exact wedge. A similarly named but unrelated London startup, Passionfruit, raised $9M last year for a broader creator marketplace serving more industries. Agentio matches YouTubers with brand deals. Catch + Release licenses creator content for brands to reuse in their own ads. None of them are locked into Passionfroot’s specific bet: B2B software only, AI automation instead of headcount, and - increasingly - a customer base that overlaps with its own cap table.

That overlap is Passionfroot’s sharpest asset and its most obvious risk in the same breath. If AI-native software spending on creator marketing keeps compounding the way it has for the last two years, Passionfroot is positioned exactly where that spend lands. If it doesn’t, the company’s growth curve and its investor base are exposed to the same downturn at the same time.

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1. Let inbound redesign the product before you redesign the pitch. Passionfroot didn’t plan a two-sided marketplace. It built a single-player tool for creators, and brands started asking for access to the same creators on their own. The founders’ job wasn’t spotting the opportunity in a strategy session - it was noticing that customers were already doing the company’s market research for them, for free, in forwarded links and inbound requests. If you’re debating whether to expand into a second customer segment, check your support inbox and referral traffic first. The market usually announces the pivot before the founders do; the skill is recognizing it as signal instead of noise.

2. Stay understaffed on purpose, and let that become the pitch. Fifteen people running campaigns for over 150 customers isn’t a headcount constraint Passionfroot is fighting - it’s the number Phan leads with. During 2021 and 2022, investors and the market told her to hire faster to grow faster; she didn’t, and watched competitors who did make layoffs later. In an AI-tooled company, a small team-to-revenue ratio isn’t just efficient, it’s now a credibility signal that a founder understands leverage rather than just burn. Treat “we could do this with fewer people” as a metric worth defending in the pitch, not something to apologize for.

3. Investor-customer overlap is real distribution - underwrite it deliberately. Passionfroot’s own cap table includes an Anthropic employee and, later, one of Anthropic’s lead institutional backers; its customer list includes several of that same backer’s portfolio companies. That’s not an accident of a small market - it’s a flywheel Phan and her investors can both name explicitly, rather than an informal hope about warm intros. If your investor’s portfolio companies are plausible customers, build that mapping into your fundraising process the same way you’d build a target-account list: ask directly who in the portfolio should be talking to you.

4. Specialization is the pitch, not the caveat. Passionfroot only serves B2B software companies, while the similarly named Passionfruit and others chase a broader creator-economy market. Investors default to asking “why not go bigger” - Phan’s answer is that narrower targeting is what let a 15-person team credibly serve 150 customers with automation instead of headcount. When you narrow your market on purpose, pre-empt the broadening question with the operating math that justifies it: show exactly what staying narrow buys you in team size, sales cycle, or margin.

5. Turn a soft claim into an artifact investors can price. “Trusted voices matter more as AI floods the internet with content” is a narrative any founder could pitch. Passionfroot backs it with the Creator Graph, a dataset that prices and scores creators the way an ad exchange prices inventory, and a Wallet that gives buyers spend visibility they didn’t have before. The lesson generalizes past creator marketing: if your pitch rests on a trend claim, build the smallest possible piece of proprietary data or infrastructure that makes the claim measurable, not just plausible. Investors don’t price narratives. They price the artifact that makes the narrative auditable.

Phan is relocating to New York to run US go-to-market, where most of Passionfroot’s customers already sit, and the company is opening a São Paulo office for customer success and engineering. The immediate roadmap is narrow on purpose: give Zest more autonomy over each campaign, deepen the Creator Graph, and prove the US expansion can run without abandoning the lean-team model that got Passionfroot here. The real test isn’t the $15M. It’s whether 15 people can still run this once the customer count doubles again.

Paid subscribers get the full breakdown: the cap-table overlap mapped out, the competitive field against Passionfruit/Agentio/Catch+Release, the funding-contraction data across the creator economy, and a template for finding investor-customer overlap in your own raise →