Exclusive: Honeyjar AI raises $2 million in pre-seed funding
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Former communications executive Michelle Masek has launched an AI operating system for comms and public relations professionals called Honeyjar AI, Axios is first to report.
Why it matters: It's an AI platform for communications, by communicators and backed by leading VC, media and comms executives.
Driving the news: Honeyjar AI has raised $2 million in a pre-seed funding round, led by Heather Hartnett, general partner and CEO at Human Ventures, and Kevin Mahaffey, founder of SNR Ventures.
- Former a16z partner Margit Wennmachers, former New York Post CEO Jesse Angelo and TechCrunch's former editor-at-large Josh Constine have also made meaningful investments in the startup.
The big picture: Communications executives are jumping at the chance to invest in AI-powered comms tech, which can automate much of the work.
- This week, Clipbook announced its seed round, supported by former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, Narrative Strategies CEO Ken Spain and Mike Kempner, founder and CEO of MikeWorldWide.
Details: Honeyjar, which Masek describes as an AI-powered comms workspace, is supported by OpenAI, Anthropic and Grok, has access to LexisNexis data, and pulls from an API ecosystem across social media sites, Substacks, podcasts and more.
- The platform creates a collaborative workspace where prompt-driven AI copilots can help PR professionals build media lists, curate speaking and event calendars, generate coverage reports and create content — like media briefs, press releases, pitches, blogs, FAQs or social posts.
Between the lines: "The vision is to allow comms folks the ability to focus on strategy, counsel, relationships and the parts of the job that only humans can do, but apply AI in a really thoughtful way," says Masek.
- AI agents are built into the platform and take sequential steps in the comms workflow using the information they have.
What they're saying: Masek and her co-founder Nadia Jamshidi sought to build a product they wish existed to support their work as comms professionals.
- "Part of the opportunity we see is that, comms people everywhere are playing around with AI," Masek says. "There are multinational agencies that are creating bespoke solutions that most of the industry will never see, and then there are in-house teams that are hacking together tools."
- "But there's just a huge gap in really solving that last mile of AI for the industry, and so that's what we've raised some money to go do."
Zoom in: Honeyjar currently costs $250 per seat per month for early adopters.
- Masek says the AI-powered workspace is built for boutique to mid-size agencies, small in-house teams, solo heads of comms and individual consultants.
- "In many ways, it's a PR firm in a box, and the ability to, you know, really have that [AI-powered] teammate support on the grunt work, so that you can double and triple our capacity, while spending more time with clients," she says.
What's next: Masek anticipates the business model will scale for enterprise memberships and will be able to assist communications teams across other functions like internal communications, issues management and eventually the marketing suite.
- "If you have an agent that understands the context of your goals, [is] messaging your institutional knowledge around previous decisions made, and is agnostic for content type, and can be prompted to do different things, like you could do media red teaming, crisis communications, internal comms and ballooning out into different aspects of the marketing function," she says.
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