Honeyjar, a startup founded by two veteran communications pros, is launching an AI platform that wants to give anyone the judgment of a senior PR expert. According to TechCrunch AI, the company is showing at this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt as part of the Startup Battlefield 200. Its pitch is simple: most of the people doing communications work aren’t trained for it, and AI can close that gap.
The founders know the field. CEO Michelle Masek and CCO Nadia Jamshidi have each spent decades in agency and in-house comms. Most recently, Masek was SVP of marketing and communications at Obvious Ventures, the venture firm run by Ev Williams. There she had to advise 110 portfolio companies on “the why and when of comms and marketing.” That raised a question for her: could senior-level expertise be scaled with AI?
What Honeyjar Actually Does
TechCrunch AI reports that the platform automates the tasks that eat up most of a comms team’s week. Jamshidi listed the core capabilities:
- Finding reporters and building targeted media lists
- Scanning news and social for relevant signals
- Tracking coverage after announcements go out
- Surfacing opportunities, including promising speaking slots
- Drafting announcements, pitches and social posts in the customer’s own voice
She says the tools are only part of the plan, though. “The bigger idea is bringing the whole communications workflow together: signals, context, strategy, judgment, timing, and execution.”
5 Things Worth Knowing About This Launch
- The target market is bigger than PR teams. Masek talks about “millions and millions of unassigned communicators”: marketers, investors, authors, creators, school superintendents and sports team leaders. None of them have comms in their job title, but all of them have to communicate strategically. That’s a far bigger market than agencies alone.
- It’s built to help PR pros, not replace them. The founders say they built the tool they wanted for themselves. Masek says it can help solo practitioners “take on that third client without any scaling cost,” and it can also make agencies and in-house teams more efficient.
- Early demand is strong. Honeyjar’s waitlist got 10,000 signups in its first 24 hours. Beta testers include Nextdoor, Coco Robotics, Bloomberg Beta, and the agencies Mission North and Full Picture. That’s an unusual spread for a pre-launch product, from consumer platforms to investors to the agencies themselves.
- A human still has to hit send. Here’s the obvious worry: journalists already get buried in AI-written pitches. Masek’s answer is that Honeyjar drafts, but the customer has to publish or send. “We never want a world where the human is removed from the loop,” she said.
- Judgment is the real product. The founders say they tried to “infuse and encode Honeyjar with our wisdom.” Through a program called the Comms Lab, they’re now training it on the judgment of other PR pros too. Jamshidi defines judgment as “knowing what to do, what not to do, when to act, and how to adapt to the situation.” In some cases, Masek says, Honeyjar may simply tell a founder they aren’t ready for coverage.
Why This Matters
What stands out is the positioning. Plenty of tools already cover pieces of this work: media databases, monitoring dashboards, and ChatGPT for drafting press releases. Honeyjar is betting that the value isn’t in any one of those tasks but in the strategic layer on top, meaning who to pitch, when, and whether to pitch at all.
That’s a harder thing to build, and harder to prove. Writing a pitch email is easy to automate. Knowing that a story isn’t newsworthy yet is a judgment call that even experienced comms people get wrong.
The caveat is obvious. A tool that makes pitching easier could flood journalists’ inboxes even faster, human in the loop or not. Masek argues the reverse: better-informed pitches from real experts should mean fewer, more credible ones. Whether that holds will depend on whether users actually listen when the AI tells them to wait.
TechCrunch AI didn’t share pricing or a general availability date, so the waitlist remains the way in for now.
What Comes Next
This is a pattern you’ll see more of: domain experts turning their judgment into AI products for people who can’t afford to hire them. If Honeyjar can show that its “not ready yet” advice actually improves results, it’ll have something generic writing tools don’t. Watch how the Comms Lab grows and whether journalists notice a change in their inboxes. You can find the full story at TechCrunch AI.