Honeyjar, a startup appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200, wants to use AI to make senior-level PR expertise available to everyone. Founded by Michelle Masek and Nadia Jamshidi—both with decades of in-house and agency communications experience—the company automates tasks such as writing announcements, building media lists, and scanning news and social channels for opportunities. Masek, formerly of Obvious Ventures, said she saw the need while helping portfolio companies with communications, asking whether senior expertise could be scaled into AI that actually helps users do the work.
The company's vision goes beyond press coverage. Jamshidi said the bigger idea is bringing the whole communications workflow together—signals, context, strategy, judgment, timing, and execution. Honeyjar targets not just PR professionals but what Masek calls "unassigned communicators": marketers, investors, authors, creators, school superintendents, and sports team leaders who handle communications without the title. The founders say they built the tool they wanted to use themselves, and they argue it can make PR firms and in-house teams more effective, allowing practitioners to take on additional clients without scaling costs.
Honeyjar is not trying to replace PR pros, and it is designed to keep humans in the loop. Masek said customers must hit send or publish on any drafted pitch or post, and the company has tried to encode its judgment into the product through an initiative called Comms Lab, which trains on the expertise of other PR professionals. She acknowledged journalists' concerns about AI-generated pitch overload, but said Honeyjar may even tell founders they are not ready for coverage, and she sees a future with more credible pitches from sources reporters actually want to hear from. The startup's waitlist drew 10,000 signups in its first 24 hours, with beta testers including Nextdoor, Coco Robotics, Bloomberg Beta, and agencies Mission North and Full Picture.