PR is a process that many journalists, founders, and even PR professionals consider broken, and Honeyjar is betting that AI can improve it. The startup, part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200, wants to make the expertise and judgment of senior PR practitioners available to everyone, especially founders who do not know where to begin. It was founded by CEO Michelle Masek and CCO Nadia Jamshidi, both of whom have spent decades in communications and agency work. Masek previously led marketing and communications at Obvious Ventures, where she saw 110 portfolio companies needing help with the why and when of comms and marketing. That experience pushed her to ask whether senior-level expertise could be scaled into AI that actually helps users do communications work in a proactive and skilled way.

Honeyjar automates tasks such as writing announcements, finding the best journalists to pitch, building media lists, scanning news and social media, tracking coverage, surfacing opportunities, and identifying speaking opportunities. Jamshidi says those capabilities matter but are only one piece of the larger vision: bringing the whole communications workflow together, including signals, context, strategy, judgment, timing, and execution. Masek also emphasizes that the product is not just for founders. She describes millions of unassigned communicators, people whose jobs include communications but who do not have the title, such as marketers, investors, authors, creators, school superintendents, and sports team leaders. The need for strategic communications is horizontal, she says, and is often passed around without getting solved.

Honeyjar is not designed to replace PR professionals. Masek says she and Jamshidi built the tool they wanted to use themselves, and that it can make PR firms and in-house comms teams more effective while letting individual practitioners take on a third client without scaling cost. The company opened a waitlist and received 10,000 signups in the first 24 hours. Beta testers include Nextdoor, Coco Robotics, investor Bloomberg Beta, and agencies Mission North and Full Picture.

Journalists might reasonably worry about receiving even more AI-generated pitch slop. Masek says Honeyjar can draft a pitch email or social post in the customer’s voice, but the customer still has to hit send or publish. “We never want a world where the human is removed from the loop,” she said. Judgment is central: Masek and Jamshidi say they have tried to encode their own wisdom into Honeyjar, and through an initiative called the Comms Lab they are training the product on the judgment of other PR pros. Jamshidi defines judgment as knowing what to do, what not to do, when to act, and how to adapt, based on a company’s goals and circumstances. In some cases, Honeyjar might even tell a founder they are not ready for coverage. Masek also sees a future with more credible pitches in journalists’ inboxes, from sources reporters actually want to hear from.