Honeyjar wants to make experienced public relations guidance more accessible, using AI to help people plan and carry out communications work. The startup is aimed at founders and the many others who handle this work without a communications title.
Turning PR expertise into tools
Honeyjar’s co-founders, CEO Michelle Masek and CCO Nadia Jamshidi, have spent decades working in communications, both inside companies and at agencies. Masek recently served as senior vice president of marketing and communications for Ev Williams’ venture firm, Obvious Ventures.
At Obvious Ventures, Masek helped with communications and marketing across 110 portfolio companies. That work raised a practical question: could senior-level expertise be made available through AI in a way that helps people do communications work proactively and with skill?
Honeyjar is designed to help with tasks such as writing announcements, finding relevant journalists to pitch, and identifying speaking opportunities. Its tools can also find reporters, build media lists, scan news and social media, and track coverage.
A broader communications workflow
Jamshidi describes those functions as one part of a larger aim: bringing communications work into a shared workflow. The company’s vision includes gathering signals and context, shaping strategy and judgment, and supporting decisions about timing and execution.
The potential users extend beyond startup founders. Masek says many people are responsible for communications without having that word in their job title. She names marketers, investors, authors, creators, school superintendents, and sports team leaders as examples.
In these roles, communications work can be passed from person to person while key problems remain unresolved. Honeyjar’s pitch is that AI can help people who lack dedicated communications support make more considered decisions about how to reach an audience.
Support for communicators, with people in control
Masek says Honeyjar is not meant to replace public relations professionals. She and Jamshidi built a tool they wanted to use themselves, and say it could help PR firms and in-house communications teams work more effectively. Individual practitioners may also be able to take on another client without the same increase in scaling costs.
The product can draft a pitch email or social media post in a customer’s voice, but it does not send or publish the content. The user makes that decision. Masek says keeping a person involved is central to the company’s approach.
That distinction matters in a field where journalists already receive more pitches than they can answer, including messages written by AI chatbots. More automated drafting could add to that volume. Honeyjar’s founders argue that the tools should help users make better choices about what to send, and when.
Judgment is part of the product
Masek says the founders have tried to encode their experience into Honeyjar. Through a broader initiative called the Comms Lab, they are also training the product on the judgment of other PR professionals.
For Jamshidi, judgment means knowing what action fits, what to avoid, when to act, and how to adapt. That depends on understanding an organization’s goals and priorities, what is happening inside and outside it, and which message belongs with which audience and moment.
Sometimes, Masek says, the appropriate guidance may be that a founder is not ready for media coverage. In that sense, the tool’s value would not be measured only by how many pitches it helps create. It could also help users hold back when the timing or preparation is not right.
Masek says Honeyjar’s waitlist received 10,000 signups in the first 24 hours. Beta testers include Nextdoor, tech startup Coco Robotics, investor Bloomberg Beta, and agencies Mission North and Full Picture.
The company’s longer-term promise rests on whether its guidance can help produce more relevant, credible outreach without adding to the flood of generic pitches. Human review remains part of the process, while the founders work to make communications expertise useful to a much wider group of people.