Creator Fund, the pre-seed VC that finds and backs Europe’s scientific founders before they have a pitch deck, has closed its first European fund at $56 million.
The UK-based firm said KfW Capital – a subsidiary of KfW, Germany’s state-owned promotional bank, operating on behalf of the federal government and the states – has joined the final close as the Fund’s biggest investor, as Creator Fund scales its model across Europe.
The world’s top scientists come to Europe to study. Since before the discovery of gravity, these universities have provided the world with answers. Creator Fund believes these scientists are the single most important asset this continent has for startup creation.
Unlike other funds, it thinks the Scientist should be in charge. To find them early, Creator Fund has built a student team across 30 universities in 10 countries, making them the first investors a PhD ever speaks to. It also runs a twenty-part Scientific Founder programme that has taken 250+ students step-by-step through founding a company.
With this $56m raise, Creator Fund becomes 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 Deep Tech – backing frontier technology that lies on the thin border between sci-fi and reality. The new Fund has made 11 investments already, including Ovo Labs – reversing the ageing of human eggs and addressing the reason women struggle to have children as they get older; Latent Worlds – allowing robots operating at the edge of civilisation to capture data from the world around them; Anzen Industries – creating new materials that do not exist in the world through the power of enzyme reactions; and SPhotonix – storing the world’s data on quartz glass through ultrafast lasers, already used by Elon Musk for his intergalactic library.
Since 2019, Creator Fund has backed 62 companies in total. It returned its first fund last year when it sold Loci to Epic Games – a company it backed after a founder’s six-second video caught their attention in a Cambridge University lab. In the past six months, two of Creator Fund’s companies have surpassed $100m in total funding.
Jamie Macfarlane, founder and CEO of Creator Fund, commented: “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.”
KfW Capital and Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (‘EIFO’) — the investment arms of the German and Danish governments — are two of the largest investors in the fund.
It also includes Equation Capital, Basecamp (Phoenix Court), JIMCO, and Allocator One. 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 start-ups,” said Christian Röhle, co-head of Investment Management at KfW Capital.
Alexandra Ntemourtsidou, COO of Creator Fund, added: “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.”