Why we invested in Passionfruit?

Article written by Beth Faus

Talent as we know it is evolving due to multiple trends coming together: (i) new generations aiming for constant change, (ii) remote work and flexible employment models, and (iii) AI accelerating talent specialisation. Which is resulting in a higher amount of young knowledge workers open to a freelancing model as a career choice.

Today, almost half of the workers worldwide are freelancers (1.57 billion people which is 46.7% of the total global workforce). In the US, 64 million Americans (38% of the US workforce) worked as freelancers in 2023 and contributed $1.3 trillion in annual earnings to the US economy.

However, freelancers are frustrated as they rarely have pre-existing networks that help them find work within tier 1 employers, or support structures that help them upskill and navigate administrative tasks.

On the other side, companies are shifting towards a talent mix where specialists play a key role as it gives them flexibility in a context where the amount of marketing content expected grows exponentially, and budgets are tighter. Their struggle to find the right talent in a cost-efficient way is increasing.

Both freelancers and companies are seeking a more efficient, direct and agile way to work with one another. Here is where Passionfruit comes to play, aiming to revolutionize the future of freelance work.

Passionfruit is an AI-powered platform that radically simplifies a company’s ability to discover, arrange and engage high-quality independent talent, initially in Marketing, while also providing on-project collaboration tooling, empowering all parties to plan, implement and report on entire work-streams within a single, streamlined platform.?

Passionfruit’s highly automated processes (incl. ML-based candidate profile scoring and project/specialist matching engine), can deliver a better user experience and shorter time to value to customers.

Passionfruit has already proven its model, and its freelance base has surged to a community of over 3,000 and today Passionfruit supports the needs of hundreds of major brands worldwide, including PepsiCo, Mars, ABinBev, HSBC and The Match Group.

We first met Raffi Salama and Issah A. more than 2 years ago, they were raising their Seed round, and their drive and passion for the business and its product vision fascinated us. Since then we’ve kept in touch and we’ve been very impressed to see how they’ve grown the business tapping into large enterprise budgets and attracting specialists to become their biggest advocates. We are confident that Passionfruit has the right ingredients of an outstanding and ambitious team and a best-in-class product to become the next category leader in the next wave of future of work.

We are proud to announce our investment into Passionfruit in their $9m round Series A. We are very excited to continue working with Raffi and Issah, and the broader team at Passionfruit as they continue their journey to empower businesses to grow via collaboration with independent workers.?