Creator Fund Closes $56M for Europe's Scientific Founders

Jan de Vries · 2026-06-08

A UK-based venture capital firm just made a huge bet on scientists who haven't even written a pitch deck yet. Creator Fund, a pre-Seed VC based in Kensington, has closed its first European fund at $56 million. The goal? Back Europe's scientific founders before they even think about raising money. ### The Big Backers Behind the Fund This isn't just any fund. KfW Capital, a subsidiary of Germany's state-owned promotional bank, joined as the largest investor. The Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) came in second. Other backers include Equation Capital, Basecamp (Phoenix Court), JIMCO, and Allocator One. In total, 71 limited partners from 21 countries 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," said Christian Rohle, co-Head of Investment Management at KfW Capital. "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." ### How Creator Fund Finds Scientists Before Anyone Else Founded in 2019 by Jamie Macfarlane, Creator Fund partners with scientific founders at the earliest stage. We're talking about the moment before they have a pitch deck or even a company. The firm invests up to $1.1 million as a first check in European startups, and it typically backs teams where a founder is a PhD, student, professor, or recent graduate. Here's the thing: Europe attracts the world's leading scientists for study. Creator Fund believes these scientists should be in charge of building companies. To find them early, the firm built a student team across 30 universities in 10 countries. They're often the first investors a PhD student ever speaks to. The VC also runs a twenty-part Scientific Founder program that has guided over 250 students step-by-step through founding a company. ### The Portfolio: Real Science, Real Solutions The new fund has already made 11 investments across the Netherlands, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, and the UK. Here are a few standouts: - **Ovo Labs**: A BioTech company from the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Gottingen, Germany. They're reversing the aging of human eggs, tackling a major 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 through enzyme reactions that don't exist in the natural world. - **SPhotonix**: A Delaware-based startup storing the world's data on quartz glass using ultrafast lasers. Yes, Elon Musk already uses them for his intergalactic library. ### Why This Matters for DeepTech in Europe 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. Macfarlane puts it best: "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." ### The Scientific Founder Program: How It Works Each year, 40 Venture Fellows are selected from 450 applicants. They're embedded across 30 universities in 10 countries, trained to spot scientific researchers with the potential to build billion-dollar companies. It's a model that's already working, and with this new fund, Creator Fund plans to back more founders than ever before. This is a big deal for anyone watching European innovation. By catching scientists before they even think about starting a company, Creator Fund is filling a gap that traditional VCs have ignored for too long. The next world-changing company might just start in a university lab, and Creator Fund wants to be the first one in the door.