UK-based Creator Fund closes €48.6 million fund to back Europe’s scientific founders before pitch deck stage

Creator Fund, a Kensington-based pre-Seed VC that finds and backs Europe’s scientific founders before they have a pitch deck, has closed its first European fund at €48.8 million ($56 million). 

The firm also announced that KfW Capital (a subsidiary of KfW, Germany’s state-owned promotional bank, which operates on behalf of the federal government and the states) has joined the final close as the fund’s largest investor. Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) is the Fund’s second-largest investor. Equation Capital, Basecamp (Phoenix Court), JIMCO, and Allocator One have also backed the fund. In total, 71 limited partners from 21 countries have committed to the fund.

“We are glad to join Creator’s newest fund generation, which targets future-focused sectors such as artificial intelligence, BioTech, computer infrastructure, AI-enabled robotics, and advanced materials. By leveraging Creator’s European academic network to access future founders at leading universities, the team addresses a key element of the innovation ecosystem: translating academic progress into high-growth startups,” said Christian Röhle, co-Head of Investment Management at KfW Capital. 

Founded in 2019 by Jamie Macfarlane, Creator Fund partners with scientific founders at the earliest stage, offering support to scale and helping them raise future rounds. It invests across sectors, with a focus on AI, DeepTech, and BioTech. It invests up to €1 million as a first cheque in European startups and typically (but not exclusively) backs teams where a founder is a PhD, student, professor, or recent graduate. The firm is backed by leading VC investors across Europe and the USA. 

The VC firm states that Europe attracts the world’s leading scientists for study, considering them the most vital asset for startup creation on the continent. Unlike other funds, it believes scientists should be in charge. In order to find them early, Creator Fund has built a student team across 30 universities in 10 countries, making them the first investors a PhD student ever speaks to. It also runs a twenty-part Scientific Founder programme that has taken over 250 students step-by-step through founding a company.

With this, Creator Fund claims to become the largest student fund in the world and the first to scale the student-sourcing model across a continent. In Europe, the focus is on DeepTech. The new Fund has made 11 investments across the Netherlands, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, and the UK, including:

Ovo Labs: a BioTech company that emerged from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen (Germany), reversing the ageing of human eggs and addressing the reason women struggle to have children as they get older.

Latent Worlds: a Delft-based startup building the backend infrastructure for robotics deployments.

Anzen Industries: a London-based startup creating new materials that do not exist in the world through enzyme reactions. 

SPhotonix: a Delaware-based startup storing the world’s data on quartz glass through ultrafast lasers, already used by Elon Musk for his intergalactic library.

Jamie Macfarlane, founder and CEO of Creator Fund, said, “The world’s biggest problems are being solved in European university labs. The scientists working on them are extraordinary but for too long, they’ve been overlooked by venture capital, pushed towards academia rather than building companies. That’s the gap we exist to fill. This fund means we can back more of them, across Europe, than ever before – and make sure the next generation of world-changing companies is built by the people who have invented the science.”

Explaining the modus operandi of Creator Fund’s Scientific Founder programme, the VC firm stated that each year, 40 Venture Fellows are selected from 450 applicants and embedded across 30 universities in 10 countries. They are trained to identify scientific researchers with the potential to build, and to support them through the earliest stages of company formation. Three of the first 11 investments from the new fund were founded by former fellows.

“We are building Europe’s most powerful deep tech talent community. The brightest PhD minds come to Creator Fund to learn how to build companies. They found businesses we back or they join our portfolio as top technical talent. Others go into VC and invest in our companies in follow on rounds. Creator Fund is the single platform enabling university talent to fuel the next frontier of European tech champions,” said Alexandra Ntemourtsidou, COO of Creator Fund. 

Since 2019, the Creator Fund has backed 62 companies. It returned its first fund last year after selling Loci to Epic Games, a company it backed after a founder’s six-second video caught its attention in a Cambridge University lab. In the past six months, two of Creator Fund’s companies have surpassed €86.7 million ($100 million) in total funding.

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