Creator Fund Closes $56M to Back Europe's Scientific Founders

Jan de Vries · 2026-06-08

A London-based venture capital firm just closed a massive $56 million fund with a unique mission: finding and funding Europe’s most promising scientific founders before they even have a pitch deck. Creator Fund, headquartered in Kensington, has officially closed its first European fund at $56 million (converted from €48.8 million). This pre-Seed VC doesn’t wait for polished presentations—they hunt for breakthroughs still bubbling in university labs. ### Who’s Backing This? The firm’s largest investor is KfW Capital, a subsidiary of Germany’s state-owned promotional bank. The Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) comes in as the second-largest backer. Other notable supporters include 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,” said Christian Röhle, 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 Operates Founded in 2019 by Jamie Macfarlane, Creator Fund partners with scientific founders at the earliest stage. They offer support to scale and help founders raise future rounds. The firm invests across sectors, with a focus on AI, DeepTech, and BioTech. Their first check can go up to $1.1 million (converted from €1 million) in European startups. Typically—but not exclusively—they back 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 Scientist-First Approach Europe attracts the world’s leading scientists for study, and Creator Fund considers them the most vital asset for startup creation on the continent. Unlike other funds, they believe scientists 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 student ever speaks to. They also run a twenty-part Scientific Founder program that has taken over 250 students step-by-step through founding a company. Each year, 40 Venture Fellows are selected from 450 applicants and embedded across those universities. They’re trained to identify scientific researchers with the potential to build world-changing companies. ### Recent Investments With this new fund, 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 from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany. They’re reversing the aging of human eggs and addressing why women struggle to have children as they get older. - **Latent Worlds**: A Delft-based startup building backend infrastructure for robotics deployments. - **Anzen Industries**: A London-based startup creating new materials through enzyme reactions that don’t exist in the world yet. - **SPhotonix**: A Delaware-based startup storing the world’s data on quartz glass using ultrafast lasers—already used by Elon Musk for his intergalactic library. ### The Bigger Picture 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.” This fund is a big deal for European innovation. It’s not just about the money—it’s about changing who gets funded and when. By catching scientists early, Creator Fund is betting that the best breakthroughs come from the lab, not the boardroom.