Jen Phan Passionfroot: The Ex-VC Who Bet on B2B Creators Before It Was Obvious

Jen Phan Passionfroot is a founder story that began with a former venture capitalist nearly quitting her job to become a full-time newsletter writer. Phan is the co-founder and CEO of Passionfroot, a Berlin-founded startup that just raised a $15 million Series A led by Insight Partners, bringing its total funding past $21 million to build what it calls the first AI-native platform for B2B creator-led growth.

The company has grown revenue 13 times over the past year while staying profitable with a team of just 15 people, working with customers including Figma, Replit, and ElevenLabs. Here is how a venture investor who once evaluated other people’s startups ended up building one of the creator economy’s more disciplined bets.

Who Is Jen Phan?

Jen Phan is the co-founder and CEO of Passionfroot, according to her LinkedIn profile. She studied at ESCP Europe and has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Before founding Passionfroot, Phan spent years as an early-stage venture investor, working as an investment manager at btov Partners, a European VC firm, after earlier roles as a company builder at Deloitte Digital and an investment analyst at Linus Capital, Rocket Internet, and Global Founders Capital.

Phan has spoken about how her family’s immigrant background shaped her entrepreneurial instincts long before she started Passionfroot, a throughline she has said connects directly to why she eventually left investing to build something of her own.

From Venture Capital to Creator to Founder

In 2020, during the pandemic, Phan started a newsletter and community for tech professionals with immigrant backgrounds, work she has described as offering a level of creative freedom and permission-free expression her VC job didn’t. The response was strong enough that she seriously considered leaving investing to become a full-time creator, but first wanted to understand what that path actually looked like financially.

That research became the seed of Passionfroot. Talking with dozens of creators about how they actually made money, Phan realized that while the creative side of the work was appealing, the business side, particularly managing brand partnerships, was fragmented and inefficient even for creators with substantial audiences. She co-founded Passionfroot in 2022 with Lorenzo De Nobili, who had previously built his own marketplace startup connecting users with professional services.

The Problem Passionfroot Set Out to Solve

B2B creators, newsletter writers, podcasters, and thought-leadership content producers with audiences of engaged professional buyers, faced a specific operational gap: no dedicated infrastructure for discovering relevant brand partners, negotiating and managing contracts, executing campaigns, and getting paid reliably. One early conversation Phan and De Nobili had illustrated the stakes directly: Zain Kahn, founder of the AI-focused newsletter Superhuman, described a single $40,000 payment that didn’t show up for months, forcing his team to chase banks for weeks just to track down the money.

That kind of operational friction, invisible to brands but existential for creators depending on that income, is what Passionfroot set out to eliminate, treating B2B creator partnerships as a category that deserved dedicated infrastructure rather than ad hoc spreadsheets and manual invoicing.

Building Passionfroot: Zest, the Creator Graph, and the Team

Passionfroot’s platform now handles the full lifecycle of a B2B creator partnership: discovery, contracting, campaign execution, and global payment, unified through an AI agent called Zest that runs campaigns from initial brief through final payment. Zest is powered by the Creator Graph, a proprietary dataset built from thousands of past campaigns that Passionfroot uses to estimate creator pricing and predict campaign performance.

Phan has framed the underlying shift in blunt terms: “We’re entering the era of the B2B creator economy, and it’s moving faster than anyone expected.” The company has also positioned itself deliberately against low-effort AI content. “We’re tired of AI slop,” Phan said in a recent interview, arguing that as AI floods the internet with generated content, trusted human voices, the domain experts and tastemakers audiences already listen to, become more valuable, not less.

Inside Passionfroot’s $21 Million in Funding

Jen Phan Passionfroot has raised more than $21 million across three rounds since its 2022 founding: a $3.4 million pre-seed round from Creandum, a $3.8 million seed round in 2024 led by Supernode Global, and a $15 million Series A announced July 22, 2026, led by Insight Partners, with continued participation from Creandum, Supernode Global, and s16vc, the fund led by Miro CEO Andrey Khusid.

The company’s angel investor list is notable in its own right, including former Zapier CMO Kieran Flanagan, former Notion community and creator lead Ben Lang, Linktree chief product officer Jiaona Zhang, and an Anthropic growth executive, a roster that reflects deep, specific expertise in both the creator economy and B2B SaaS growth.

Customers and Growth: Profitable With a Team of 15

Passionfroot says it grew revenue 13 times over the past year while remaining profitable, an unusually disciplined growth profile for a Series A company, achieved with a team of only 15 people. The company now works with more than 150 B2B brands, including ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma, connecting them with creators who reach the specific professional audiences those companies are trying to influence.

That combination, meaningful revenue growth, profitability, and a small team, suggests Passionfroot’s own AI-native operating model, using its own automation internally rather than just selling it to customers, is functioning as intended rather than existing purely as a product marketing claim.

The Investors Backing Jen Phan

Insight Partners leading Passionfroot’s Series A carries particular weight given the firm’s scale and track record; the New York-based investor manages more than $90 billion in assets and has previously backed Anthropic, Shopify, and Wiz. Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, has said Passionfroot has the right dynamics on both sides of its marketplace to warrant a genuine platform for B2B creators, pointing to both the consumerization of B2B marketing and a growing supply of domain experts who want to create quality content.

That framing, a real two-sided marketplace rather than a single-sided tool, is central to how investors appear to be valuing Passionfroot relative to point solutions addressing only the brand side or only the creator side of the relationship.

Passionfroot’s Position in the Creator Economy Race

Passionfroot occupies a fairly specific niche within the broader creator economy: B2B, rather than consumer, creator marketing, a category with less competition than the crowded consumer influencer marketing space but a smaller, more specialized pool of relevant creators. Its close ties to AI-native customers like Anthropic-adjacent angels, ElevenLabs, and Replit also position the company well to capture marketing budgets specifically from the current wave of AI companies that need to build trust and category understanding, not just product awareness.

That specificity is likely both Passionfroot’s biggest advantage and its clearest constraint: a defensible, underserved niche, but one that requires continued expansion of the pool of credible B2B creators for the marketplace to keep scaling in both directions.

What’s Next for Passionfroot

With fresh Series A capital, Passionfroot’s near-term priorities center on expanding Zest’s ability to autonomously manage more of each campaign, deepening the Creator Graph’s predictive accuracy, and scaling its U.S. go-to-market operations as Phan relocates from Berlin to New York to lead that push. Product and engineering will remain based in Berlin, while a new office in São Paulo will focus on customer success and engineering, giving the company a genuinely international operating footprint for a company of its size.

Phan has framed Passionfroot’s ambition around making creator-driven marketing as measurable and scalable as paid search became roughly fifteen years ago, a comparison that stakes out a much larger long-term opportunity than B2B creator marketing alone currently represents.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs From Jen Phan’s Journey

Phan’s path offers a few clear lessons for founders considering a leap from an adjacent industry into building their own company. First, her own near-decision to become a full-time creator, before ultimately building infrastructure for other creators instead, shows how firsthand exposure to an unsolved personal problem can be more valuable than observing that problem from the outside. Second, her venture capital background gave her an unusually clear-eyed view of what investors actually look for, evident in Passionfroot’s disciplined focus on profitability and capital efficiency alongside growth, rather than growth at any cost.

Third, recruiting angel investors with specific, relevant operating experience, from Zapier, Notion, and Linktree, gave Passionfroot access to genuinely useful product and growth guidance beyond what capital alone provides.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jen Phan? Jen Phan is the co-founder and CEO of Passionfroot, a B2B creator marketing platform. She previously worked as an early-stage venture investor at btov Partners before founding Passionfroot in 2022 with Lorenzo De Nobili.

What does Passionfroot do? Passionfroot is an AI-native platform that manages the full B2B creator partnership lifecycle, discovery, contracting, campaign execution, and payment, using an AI agent called Zest powered by a proprietary dataset called the Creator Graph.

How much funding has Passionfroot raised? Passionfroot has raised more than $21 million total across three rounds: a $3.4 million pre-seed round, a $3.8 million seed round in 2024, and a $15 million Series A announced July 22, 2026, led by Insight Partners.

Who co-founded Passionfroot with Jen Phan? Passionfroot was co-founded by Jen Phan and Lorenzo De Nobili, who had previously built his own marketplace startup connecting users with professional services.

Is Passionfroot profitable? Yes. Passionfroot says it grew revenue 13 times over the past year while remaining profitable, with a team of only 15 people as of its Series A announcement.

Who are Passionfroot’s customers? Passionfroot works with more than 150 B2B brands, including ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma, connecting them with creators who reach specific professional audiences.

Where is Passionfroot based? Passionfroot was founded in Berlin, where its product and engineering teams remain based. The company is opening a New York office, where CEO Jen Phan is relocating, and a third office in São Paulo focused on customer success and engineering.

Conclusion

Jen Phan Passionfroot represents a distinctive bet inside the broader creator economy funding wave: that B2B, not consumer, creator marketing is the more durable, underserved category, and that discipline learned from years spent as a venture investor is as valuable to a founder as raw growth ambition. With more than $21 million raised, 13x revenue growth while remaining profitable, and a customer roster spanning some of AI’s most recognizable names, Passionfroot is testing whether Phan’s own path from VC to nearly-full-time creator to founder was itself a preview of the exact market she’s now building infrastructure for.

For more founder stories in profitable, capital-efficient startups and international founders, see Tom Reno’s Agave, Randall Hom’s Hostie, and Baran Ataş’s Talp on Denote Press.