Creator Fund has closed a $56 million European fund to back PhD founders before they have a pitch deck, let alone a company.
The UK-based pre-seed fund first appeared back in 2020 (when I covered them on TechCrunch). It claims that this news vehicle is the largest VC fund targeting students worldwide. KfW Capital, the German government-backed investor, has joined as the fund’s largest LP. Denmark’s EIFO is also among the major LPs, alongside Equation Capital, Basecamp, JIMCO and Allocator One. In total, 71 LPs from 21 countries committed to the fund.
Creator Fund’s thesis is that Europe’s universities are full of world-class scientific talent, but venture capital usually finds it too late, and usually after the best researchers have already been pulled deeper either into academia, Big Tech corporates or US labs.
“The number one thing you’ve got across every single country on the European continent is world-class universities,” co-founder Jamie Macfarlane told Pathfounders at an interview. “Chinese, Indian, American… they all move here to study. The question is, how do you get them to build big businesses?”
Macfarlane previously worked with the advertising and marketing agency WPP, being contracted out to work with democratic political parties in far-flung regions such as Cambodia, Croatia, and even Myanmar when it briefly became free before a military crackdown.
After that, he went to Stanford Business School, and saw the model for a student-focused VC: “There's funds like this that are essentially across every American university campus.”
Creator is effectively trying to get to this talent first. It’s built a network of ‘student investors’ across 30 universities in 10 countries, designed to spot scientific founders inside labs before they surface on the usual VC circuit. It also runs a 20-part ‘Scientific Founder’ programme, which has now taken more than 250 students through the process of turning research into a company.
Macfarlane said the model has scaled from “seven students in London and Cambridge” in 2020 to backing 62 companies across Europe. “Our model is we’re the first cheque into PhD, deeply technical scientific founders, helping them get six years of innovation in AI or robotics into a big business,” he said.
The new fund has already backed 11 companies across the Netherlands, Hungary, Denmark, Germany and the UK. Early bets include Ovo Labs, which is working on reversing the ageing of human eggs; Latent Worlds, which is building data capture for robots operating in extreme environments; Anzen Industries, which is developing new materials using enzyme reactions; and SPhotonix, which stores data on quartz glass using ultrafast lasers (already used by Elon Musk for his ‘intergalactic’ library).
Since 2019, Creator Fund has backed 62 companies. It says it returned its first fund last year through the sale of Loci to Epic Games, a company it backed after spotting a short video from a Cambridge lab. Macfarlane said Creator Fund saw the founder’s thesis online: “a six-second tennis video between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer,” rendered so it could be experienced from multiple angles. “This technology could be a very big business,” he said.
The strategic backdrop to the fund is that the UK and Europe want sovereign capability in AI, robotics, semiconductors, advanced materials, biotech and dual-use technologies.
Macfarlane said LP interest in European deep tech is still returns-driven, but the wider narrative has shifted to resilience. “We cannot rely on Chinese semiconductors, and America is a less reliable supplier than it used to be,” he said. “The major economic and strategic imperative now is: how do we deliver homegrown solutions?”
On dual-use, Macfarlane said Creator Fund will not back pure weapons, but does see major opportunities in defence-adjacent university science. “We can’t invest in anything that takes human life,” he said. “We’re not investing in weaponry, but there’s really interesting dual-use stuff at universities.”
He also does not pretend $56 million is enough to carry these companies through the whole venture journey. Its job is to find the researcher early, write the first cheque, and make the next round competitive, he said.
“My number one job after we lead a pre-seed is to get the company to raise a top-quality $5 million, $10 million, $20 million seed or Series A,” Macfarlane said. “We want top funds… it's a feeder to the best funds in the world, so we want that to be a really competitive market… nobody has preferential access.”
The broader pitch is that Europe’s next deep tech companies are less likely to come from accelerator demo days, but from much earlier, PhD students inside university labs who need encouragement to become founders in their own right.
