Smarter Ventures leads the round, with Antler and UNIIQ on board. For us, it means one thing above all: we can now give more quality teams in the food industry an AI colleague, faster.
Maikel Fontein
2
min
We've closed a €1.4 million seed round. Smarter Ventures leads the round and invests €950,000 in total, joined earlier by Antler and UNIIQ. A year ago, Smarter Ventures came on board through the Venture Grower Programme. This investment is the next step in that partnership.
A challenge that needs fixing now
Food companies have to share about thirty percent more data every year on quality, packaging, safety, and sustainability. All of it lands on quality teams whose capacity isn't growing at the same rate. Questionnaires, spec checks, and certificate renewals keep piling up on people who should be doing other work.
Passionfruit is the AI colleague of the quality team. It works from the team's own SharePoint, QMS, and inbox, and takes the recurring quality work off their plate — sourced and audit-ready, so the team can trust it without having to check it themselves.
Rick Vink, QA Specialist at Jan Zandbergen, feels the difference directly:
"This morning's questionnaire took me about fifteen minutes. Without Passionfruit, the same questionnaire would have taken me about half a day." Beneo and GNT are seeing the same thing, with Passionfruit now a regular part of their quality teams too.
Why our investors are stepping in
"We like investing in founders who learn and grow fast," says Kristian de Lange of Smarter Ventures. "Maikel and Lars have shown a lot this past year. The customer base is growing quickly, the team has gotten stronger, and the product is proving itself in the market. We're proud to lead this round."
"The AI market is shifting from models to applications," says Anton Loeffen. "The difference gets made by domain knowledge, proprietary data, and smart AI. That combination is what we see in Passionfruit." Edwin de Ruijter, who guided us through the Venture Grower Programme this past year, adds: "Together we sharpened the proposition, strengthened the focus on the ideal customer, and made onboarding new customers scalable."
"We set out to give quality teams an AI colleague they can rely on," says co-founder Maikel Fontein. "This round means we can bring that colleague to a lot more teams, a lot faster."
The team is growing too
With this investment, we're expanding our team and speeding up product development.
"This gets us ready for the next stage of growth, so we can help even more international food companies," says co-founder Lars Kuijpers.
That means new roles in product, engineering, and customer success — for people who find it just as interesting as we do to make AI actually do the work, in an industry where that work matters. Curious about our open roles? Check out [website].
What this means for quality teams
This round doesn't change how Passionfruit works today — it changes how many quality teams we can help with it, and how fast. Is your team still handling questionnaires, spec checks, or certificate renewals by hand? Get in touch here and find out what an AI colleague could do for your team.
