From Dragons’ Den to Disney ambitions: Steven Bartlett raises eight-figure round for Steven.com

Podcast personality and entrepreneur Steven Bartlett today announced his company Steven.com has closed a major eight-figure investment, at a €365 million valuation to build what he calls the “Disney of the creator economy” and take his growing media empire to a global stage.

The investment was led by investors Slow Ventures and Apeiron Investment Group. This is believed to be Europe’s biggest ever creator holding company fundraising round.

Bartlett, who is also the creator and host of Diary Of A CEO (DOAC), said: “By bringing together creator IP, capital and our infrastructure, Steven.com is positioning itself to lead in the next era of the creator economy. My ultimate ambition is to build the Disney of the creator economy – and the strategic partners this funding round has brought on board has enabled me to take a big step in that direction.”

The funding round for Steven.com represents an exceptional scale compared with other European creator-economy and media-infrastructure fundings reported by EU-Startups in 2025.

While recent announcements such as Wyrld (Germany) (€1 million pre-Seed for creator-led e-commerce), Assisterr (UK) (€2.4 million for no-code AI-agent creation), Paid (UK) (€10 million to power the AI-agent economy) and Camera Intelligence (UK) (€1.7 million for AI-enabled creator hardware) focus on early-stage innovation, Bartlett’s eight-figure raise at a €365 million valuation signals a move toward consolidation and scale.

In contrast to these smaller rounds, Steven.com’s investment highlights the emergence of more mature, vertically integrated creator-media companies in Europe, particularly in the UK – positioning it as a potential anchor firm in the continent’s evolving creator-economy landscape.

“For the last century, companies like Disney – from its starting point with Walt Disney himself – has demonstrated the power of a single piece of intellectual property. He and his successors built a global empire by taking a character like Mickey Mouse and building a universe around him: films, theme parks, merchandise and more. This created a flywheel of immense, compounding value which resulted in a generational company.

“With my team, I think we are building the modern version of this model. But in our world, the IP is not a fictional character. The creator is the new franchise. Our mission is to build the defining company of the creator economy by constructing an ecosystem that scales a creator’s influence across two core pillars: creator media and creator ventures, while powering this flywheel with our proprietary creator technology,” added Bartlett.

EU-Startups has featured Steven Bartlett and his ventures multiple times over recent years. In January 2023, we reported on the launch of his $100 million Flight Story Fund to support European startups. Later, in March 2023, Bartlett and his fund were referenced as investors in London-based healthtech ZOE. His name appeared again in November 2024 in an article profiling his former business partner’s new marketing startup, cocreatd.

In 2025, Bartlett’s influence in the creator-economy space was acknowledged twice more: first in January 2025, where his Diary of a CEO channel was listed among the “25 must-follow YouTube channels for startups and entrepreneurs,” and later in June 2025, which included him in a roundup of leading business voices on TikTok.

Megan Lightcap, Partner at Slow Ventures said: “At Slow Ventures, we’ve long believed that creators are the next great entrepreneurs – and Steven Bartlett is a first-rate example. He isn’t just one of the fastest-growing and most trusted voices in the world; he’s a meticulously data-driven entrepreneur whose content, deep community, and portfolio of companies create a powerful flywheel that fuels system-wide growth. We couldn’t be more excited to back him through the Slow Creator Fund as he scales Steven.com across media, products, and technology.”

This new funding will accelerate Bartlett’s mission to empower creator media companies and creator ventures to scale globally and develop world-class creator IP and creator commerce eco-systems. The investment also enables Bartlett and his company – incorporating established divisions FlightStory, FlightCast and FlightFund – to maintain full independence, with Bartlett holding majority ownership of more than 90%.

Christian Angermayer – Apeiron Investment Group – said: “I have known Steven for several years now, and he is one of the brightest visionary entrepreneurs I’ve ever worked with – a true and rare asset to British entrepreneurship. Him and his world class management team are building the infrastructure to transform individual creators into institutional-grade businesses through an integrated ecosystem of media, ventures, and technology.

“We are backing the company that will define the creator economy by proving that the individual, properly capitalised and supported, can build empires that rival the entertainment conglomerates of the last century. Europe needs to take the creator economy very seriously and we need more platforms like Steven.com to build their empires right here in Europe.“

With the creator economy projected to reach more than $528 billion by 2030 and more than 207 million active creators worldwide, Steven.com is positioned to harness this momentum by combining investment, media expertise and technology infrastructure under one roof.

Bartlett already works with prominent creator talent through his media division, FlightStory. This includes Trevor Noah, Davina McCall, and Paul C. Brunson. The company acquires, scales and builds commercial infrastructure around top creator media IP, whilst investing in and incubating creator ventures.

Bartlett has also built a suite of public and proprietary tools that use creator audience data to remove guesswork from strategy and growth decisions on creator IP. Earlier this month he announced the public launch of one such tool called FlightCast.com – the world’s first podcast hosting platform built for video, with in-built AI and testing capabilities.

DOAC – which he created and also presents through FlightStory – is now the world’s second biggest interview podcast with more than 13 million YouTube subscribers and 70 million monthly views/downloads. It had achieved more than one billion streams across all platforms by late 2024 and this month (Oct 2025) it surpassed one billion views on YouTube alone. It also remains the No1 Podcast in the UK and Europe and is currently adding 600K new YouTube subscribers each month – making it the fastest growing show in the world – with a 500% compound annual growth rate.

Previous guests include Michelle Obama, MrBeast, Matthew McConaughey, Louis Tomlinson, Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson and, most recently, former Liverpool FC manager Jurgen Klopp.

Bartlett has invested in more than 40 companies, including SpaceX, Whoop, Lovable, Replit, MrBeast, Cadence, Groq, and PerfectTed. This month PerfectTed also became Dragon’s Den’s most successful ever investment with the company now being valued at more than $190 million less than three years since the Founders appeared on the TV series.

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