Honeyjar offers AI tools to improve PR and comms at every company

Journalists, entrepreneurs, and even some public relations professionals will tell you that the PR process is broken (buy me a drink sometime, and I’ll give you my rant). But could AI actually make things better?

Honeyjar, which will be attending this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt as part of the Startup Battlefield 200, wants to use AI to make the expertise and judgment of the best PR pros available to everyone, including founders who have no idea where to start.

The startup’s founders, CEO Michelle Masek and CCO Nadia Jamshidi, certainly fit the bill when it comes to PR expertise. They’ve both spent decades in the field, doing in-house communications and working at agencies. Masek recently served as senior vice president of marketing and communications for Ev Williams’ venture firm, Obvious Ventures.

As Masek described the challenges involved in “helping with the why and when of comms and marketing for 110 portfolio companies” (the startups her firm had invested in), I flashed back to my own brief stint leading marketing at an early-stage VC firm, where founders were constantly asking for help getting into TechCrunch. So I wasn’t surprised that Masek found herself asking, “Is there a way to scale the senior-level expertise into AI [in a way] that actually helps users do the work of comms in the proactive and skilled way that we do?”

Honeyjar is her answer to that question. It automates processes like writing announcements, finding the best journalists to pitch, and identifying the most promising speaking opportunities. But Jamshidi told me in a follow-up email that Honeyjar’s vision goes beyond getting press coverage and beyond specific AI tools.

And it’s not just for founders. Masek said she’s come to realize there are “millions and millions of unassigned communicators responsible for the work of comms.”

“We never want a world where the human is removed from the loop,” she said.