Tech
Modash is flipping the influencer marketing script by connecting brands with the long tail of creators
Estonia-based startup Modash has raised a $12 million Series A led by henQ, a Dutch VC firm that prides itself in “funding the odd ones.” And what’s odd about Modash, according to CEO Avery Schrader, is that its team “has a really strong opinion in a space that nobody really has much faith in anymore.”
The space in question is influencer marketing. Like competitors CreatorIQ and Upfluence, Modash helps brands like Farfetch discover people who can promote their message. But instead of focusing on content creators with big followings, Modash scrapes open data to let its clients find matches among the long tail of the 250 million creators it says it lists (unless they opt out.)
This means brands are being connected with relatively niche content creators through Modash’s platform. But — the founders’ theory is — these are individuals who can pack a marketing punch as their smaller follower bases may be more engaged with, and put a higher store on, what they’re saying.
Essentially, it’s a flipping of the usual influencer marketing script which could help circumvent some of the cynicism that’s sprung up around highly paid influencers shilling products. Not having creators sign in also makes it easier to scale, in a space where pure marketplaces have struggled.
This is why Modash remains bullish on the creator economy — even as Schrader understands why others might not be. “The whole VC class has already placed one or two bets that have already gone down the drain in the space,” he told TechCrunch.
“[But] people miss the point that the creator is the atomic unit of the internet, and [creators] will just keep making stuff,” he went on, explaining why he and his team believe in the marketing power of content creators and in the market opportunity of helping them monetize.
“Whatever you immediately think of when you think ‘influencer’… I think it really has a negative connotation… Whatever you don’t consume is what you think of an influencer as, and then whatever you consume, whatever is in your own YouTube search history, that’s who we support,” he added. “It’s like the small creators doing the weirdest stuff, talking about the things they really love.”
The 26-year-old Canadian fits the bill himself; originally from Nova Scotia where he tinkered with videos and forums, he made his way to Estonia after reading that it was becoming “the Silicon Valley of Europe.” There, he soon found himself recording podcast episodes with the Baltics technorati, while trying his hand at influencer marketing for clients like Estonian scale-up Bolt.
The client side of the problem is key to Modash. The startup’s vision is that brands want an end-to-end platform that lets them source creators, but also analyze campaigns, manage payments, and more. That’s what it monetizes, with plans starting from $199 a month up to a custom enterprise tier.
With Bolt and an Estonian agency among its first clients, Tallinn proved to be a great launchpad for Modash. Whether or not the comparison with Silicon Valley stands, network effects were clearly at play and several Estonian founders became Modash’s first mentors and angels, some of whom have returned to join its latest round too.
The capital city is also where Schrader met his co-founder and CTO, Estonian software engineer Hendry Sadrak (on the right in the picture above) and the rest of their founding team. “Even today, 40% or 50% of the company is in Estonia,” said Schrader. “Lots of them from Bolt, Pipedrive, Transferwise… — the Estonian mafia.”
If Schrader sounded unsure about the exact percentage of local staffers it’s a reflection of how much the team has grown over the last few months. “We were like 25 [people] in the beginning of the year, we’re now 60, and we’ve set a cap for next year that we won’t go beyond 99, because it’s really important to keep the team as small as we can.”
Many of Modash’s new hires will focus on data engineering, as AI-enabled discovery features are a big part of its product roadmap.
In addition, the startup plans to recruit people for customer-facing roles in North America to be closer to its clients there.
Schrader himself was back in Canada when he talked to TechCrunch, and he told us he plans to spend at least half his time in the country going forward. International expansion and an increased focus on e-commerce will be the startup’s priorities leading up to its Series B round, he said.
Tech
Passionfroot raises $15M to expand its B2B creator marketplace to the US
Passionfroot, a German startup building a marketplace connecting B2B creators with brands, said on Wednesday it has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners.
Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, said Passionfroot is placed well at a time when creators are specializing as AI companies look for more visibility.
“Passionfroot has the perfect dynamics on both sides to warrant a true marketplace for B2B creators. On the demand side, there is increasing consumerization of the way B2B brands go to market. That’s a product of, in part, AI technology requiring evangelism, narrative building, and education. On the supply side, there are people who have real expertise, understand a market deeply, and want to create quality content,” she told TechCrunch over a call.
With the funding, the Berlin-based startup’s co-founder and CEO, Jen Phan, is moving to New York, where Passionfroot is opening an office to expand its U.S. operations. The company is also opening an office in São Paulo, and expanding its current headcount of 15 employees.
As AI makes it easier to build products, companies are focusing on using creators to improve brand recall and recognition, Phan said.
“Every head of marketing or growth leader I’m talking to is saying really the same thing: AI is commoditizing software and flooding every category with new products, features, and launches. It’s incredibly crowded and noisy. That is why B2B buyers are going to channels like LinkedIn, a creator’s Substack, or a podcast on YouTube to discover new products and tools,” she said.
Phan said over the last year, the company increased its revenue by 13 times, and onboarded clients such as ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma.
Since its last fundraise in 2024, the company has released an AI agent called Zest, which helps brands create, execute and monitor the performance of campaigns. Passionfruit claims Zest can also help companies find suitable creators both inside and outside the platform that are suited to its marketing strategy.
The startup says it uses a proprietary creator graph based on data about reach and performance from thousands of campaigns. There’s also a wallet that companies can use to pay creators across the globe, and measure their expenditure.
Passionfroot claims it has paid at least $10 million to creators on its platform in the last 18 months.
The company says it is working on helping its clients measure how a campaign is impacting AI citations, and how their brand appears in AI-powered answers. The startup is also planning to build AI features for creators, such as helping them with monetization tips and content ideas.
The funding comes as creator platforms like Substack and Beehiiv move to help creators find better monetization opportunities. Beehiiv launched a new community and ad marketplace last week, and Substack has introduced subscriber-only perks within newsletters.
Passionfroot’s Series A also saw participation from existing investors Creandum, Supernode Global, and s16vc. The company has raised more than $21 million so far.
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Tech
Cascade raises $3.5M to help construction firms find and win projects
Cascade, a startup building a platform to help architecture, engineering, and construction firms find and win projects, has raised a $3.5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, Ada Ventures, and Snowball VC.
Launched in 2025, Cascade is a result of its founders, Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, witnessing firsthand the difficulty construction businesses face with predictably securing work.
“My mother worked in a company that sold materials to construction companies, and my uncle built mansions in the Middle East. They’re incredible at their craft but just don’t have access to the right tools to get more work,” Ferreira told TechCrunch. And Zia recalled the time her father tried starting a construction business back in her native Pakistan: “He just couldn’t get enough projects to sustain himself.”
Zia describes the current process of finding construction projects as a “constant treasure hunt,” with firms having to log into each U.S. state, city, district, county, and federal agency’s portals. “So if you’re really good at building suspension bridges, you have to find all of those opportunities across these disparate portals.”
Cascade aims to help architecture, construction, and engineering firms on this front by tracking ongoing and upcoming projects, and then using prior tender data to predict which developers are likely to win the deals.
Here’s how the platform works: A company signs up to the platform, and then Cascade uses AI tools to determine which projects they have the best chance of winning. It also predicts what projects are coming up, using different signals and data points across U.S. states, local districts, private contracts, and federal agencies. For example, if a state announces a $100 million affordable housing grant, Cascade will monitor which developers won the grant the last time it was announced.
“We connect that data, and we tell our customers: ‘Most likely one of these five developers will win this newly announced grant, so go start talking to them to win projects,’” Ferreira explained.
The duo applied to a16z’s Speedrun last September. They said the pressure to do well on demo day and being around the “brilliance” of other founders helped the company sign contracts with firms that have built the JFK and La Guardia airports, Four Seasons hotels, and some data centers. “Speedrun gave us visibility and a stamp of approval to close big deals,” Zia said.
The startup will use the fresh cash to go to market, host industry events, and hire more engineers.
Other startups in this area include GovWin IQ and ConstructConnect, but Ferreira argues Cascade is a bit more AI-native than these platforms.
“Every time a customer wins a bid, they give feedback, so the system keeps getting smarter. Over time, we’ll have a complete map of the industry that our AI can traverse to predict the best projects and leads for each customer,” she said.
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Tech
If you pay a hacker’s ransom, chances are that they’ll come back for more
Governments have long warned not to pay a hacker’s ransom demands, arguing that doing so only lets criminals profit from their cyberattacks and funds the next one. There’s also another reason: The hackers are unlikely to leave you alone if you pay up once, and many will come back demanding more.
In a report published Wednesday, cybersecurity giant Proofpoint said it surveyed 953 companies and found that over one-third of companies that paid a hacker’s ransom were hit with a second extortion demand. The findings underscore the long-held understanding among security researchers and network defenders that it’s impossible to negotiate in good faith with an extortion racket because there’s no incentive for the other side to actually walk away.
Proofpoint’s data shows that ransomware attacks and extortion attacks have evolved from a single transaction where hackers would get paid once and move on, into an effort using multiple forms of leverage, such as retaining stolen data under the threat of publicly releasing it.
While hackers have claimed in the past that they will delete or destroy the victim’s stolen data, past incidents have shown that not to be the case.
Last month, a hack at market research firm Klue exposed data belonging to its customers, including several cybersecurity firms. The company said it struck a deal with the hackers, who claimed to have deleted the data, but the company later conceded that a separate hacking group swiped a sample of the company’s stolen data, leaving its customers exposed to potential future extortion demands.
A similar situation befell Change Healthcare in 2024, after a Russian-speaking ransomware gang stole the health and medical data of the majority of people in America, some 192 million people. Amid a dispute between the hackers and their affiliates (criminal groups often subcontract out attacks), Change Healthcare paid separate ransoms to both groups of criminals to keep the sensitive medical data off of the internet.
Security researchers have long suspected that ransomware gangs and extortion rackets will keep hold of the victim’s stolen data, even after a payment is made. U.K. law enforcement confirmed this during their takedown efforts targeting the prolific LockBit ransomware gang in 2024. Police said that they found victims’ stolen data stored on LockBit’s servers long after they had paid the ransom.
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