Creator Fund has closed its first European fund at £42 million to back scientific founders at pre-seed stage across Europe. The UK-based firm announced that KfW Capital has joined the final close as the fund's largest investor, alongside 71 limited partners from 21 countries in total.
The fund targets PhD researchers at European universities before they have a pitch deck, with a focus on deep tech. To source deals, Creator Fund has built a student team across 30 universities in 10 countries, making it the first investor many PhD founders speak to.
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.
The fund has already made 11 investments across the Netherlands, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, and the UK. Portfolio companies include Ovo Labs, which is working to reverse the ageing of human eggs; Latent Worlds, which enables robots operating at the edge of civilisation to capture environmental data; Anzen Industries, which creates new materials through enzyme reactions; and SPhotonix, which stores data on quartz glass using ultrafast lasers.
With the £42 million raise, Creator Fund becomes one of the largest student funds in the world and the first to scale the student-sourcing model across a continent. Since 2019, the firm has backed 62 companies in total. It returned its first fund after selling portfolio company Loci to Epic Games, and in the past six months two of its portfolio companies have surpassed $100 million in total funding.
The fund's deal flow is supported by a Scientific Founder programme, through which 40 Venture Fellows are selected annually from 450 applicants and embedded across 30 universities in 10 countries. Three of the first 11 investments from the new fund were founded by former fellows.
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.
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.
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.
