TL;DR: We’ve raised $4.3m to make work work for everyone. With our first investment round we’re creating the commercial and product foundations for Passionfruit - building for a world where the next generation of knowledge workers can take back control of their professional lives, and companies are able to access and collaborate with talent more efficiently than ever before.
The Vision
As the long-standing model of full-time, in-person company employment starts to lose its dominance, a new era of work is starting to take shape. One core aspect of this era relates to control: what we see is that young people today want to run their professional life on their own terms. Gone are the days where it’s cool to climb the ladder of one business for your whole career.
But, for many, the structure and simplicity of the corporate cushion on which they sit - comprising paid work, community and financial wellness - is absent in the world of freelance.
However much you want to, unless you’re a +25 year veteran, with a black book of contacts, a private accountant and plentiful savings, there’s no way you can go it alone.
We at Passionfruit believe that everyone should have the freedom to choose how they work.
There should be a single platform for Gen Z freelancers, that recreates and improves the wrap-around value of company employment. This one comprehensive operating system would coordinate the fragmented and siloed needs of a white-collar worker, such that it would allow anyone to start, sell, market and manage their professional services independently. That is what we’re building here at Passionfruit.
The Backers
Fundamentally transforming how white collar workers offer their labour to the market - starting with marketing - and of course how companies access and collaborate with that labour force, is no easy undertaking.
Therefore we are delighted to announce the support of firstminute Capital and Playfair who are leading our $4.3m seed round. They are joined by FJ Labs and Portfolio Ventures, along with scouts from Atomico, Accel, and Notion. Additionally, we are proud to have the support of founders and early execs from companies such as Stripe, AirBnB, Deliveroo, Turo, Trouva and Workday, plus operating partners from Softbank and L Catterton.
In short, it’s a world-class cap table and the entire team is delighted to be working with them.
The Real Story
Of course, what we’re actually trying to say is that the experience for all existing and future users of Passionfruit is about to get so much better.
For specialists, we’ll continue to invest in the full suite of working, learning and earning tools, as we make Passionfruit their professional home.
As for demand-side customers: over the past year, we’ve fast become the smart choice for hundreds of fast-growing technology companies across a range of industries, and we now work with portfolio companies of 65 of the world’s top 100 VCs. As we grow, we’re going to start opening our platform up to a select few enterprise customers as well.
Thanks to everyone that’s helped us on our journey so far; most of all our incredible team across our London and Lisbon hubs. We’re onboarding new teammates in sales, engineering and product over the next month or so, and as part of that we’re excited to be welcoming our first remote-based teammates too.
There’s a lot of work ahead to ensure we keep delivering on our mission, but we couldn’t be more excited for the challenge. Here’s to the next step!
Raffi and Issah
