Rotterdam-based Passionfruit, an AI startup that helps food companies tackle ESG, quality, and compliance challenges, has secured a €250,000 investment from Smarter Ventures.
Smarter Ventures offers a new approach to venture capital by investing in entrepreneurs who use technology to solve real-world problems. They focus on early-growth software companies, especially in AI and Web3.
In addition to funding, Smarter Ventures provides the Venture Grower program, which offers guidance from experienced entrepreneurs to help founders achieve sustainable growth.
“We’ve spoken to many startups over the past year,” says Kristian de Lange, Founder of Smart Ventures. “Passionfruit stood out. Maikel and Lars are persistent, adaptable, and have built a powerful solution to a business-critical problem.”
This funding round will support the Dutch company in scaling its product and expanding its client base, which already includes notable names such as FrieslandCampina, Volcafe, and FunnyFoods Factory.
Passionfruit: Automating ESG, quality, or safety questionnaire
Passionfruit was founded by Maikel Fontein, a former business lead at Unilever with extensive compliance experience, and Lars Kuijpers, a seasoned product designer and software engineer.
The company’s platform aims to simplify and speed up the labour-intensive task of responding to questionnaires related to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), safety, and quality standards.
“Many companies in the food sector are struggling with increasing demands from customers around food safety, ESG, and compliance,” says Maikel Fontein. “We help them manage this more efficiently and intelligently — without needing to hire more people.”
Passionfruit’s solution is designed to cut down the time compliance, quality, and sustainability teams spend on manually completing questionnaires—a process that often requires extensive document searches and data entry into various formats like Excel or proprietary portals.
With its AI-driven technology, the platform automates up to 90 per cent of these tasks, offering companies insight into data sharing, reducing repetitive workload, and enhancing the efficiency of responses for clients and auditors alike.
Passionfruit is currently working with several Dutch and international customers, including FrieslandCampina, Volcafe, and FunnyFoods Factory.
“That last client, FunnyFoods Factory, gave us the biggest compliment just last week,” says Maikel.
“Since we started using Passionfruit, four of our customers have asked what changed in our process. They notice the difference: we communicate more professionally and faster than ever before. Internally, we now spend 75 per cent less time per compliance questionnaire,” concludes Yvette Thewissen, QA lead, Funny Foods Factory.
