This bigger second fund will invest in the brightest scientific minds across the UK and help them scale businesses. Creator Fund backs PhD, academic and student talent building frontier technology startups in areas such as AI and life sciences to robotics and quantum computing.

Creator Fund also has closed a smaller European fund dedicated to angel investments in universities across Europe. Creator Fund was the first to pioneer in Europe the Silicon Valley-style model of investing in students, and it has now raised the biggest fund of its kind anywhere in the world.  The ambition is to be the partner for any student founder from Stockholm to Zurich to Cambridge.  

Creator Fund believes the next generation of great European technology businesses will be built on university campuses, using strong technical talent and pioneering concepts emerging from its laboratories and classrooms. Its model has seen the Fund train 80 students at 28 different universities to source and analyse startups on-the-ground. These “student investors” go on to work at top tier funds when they graduate, and strengthen the power of the Creator Fund network. 

Jamie Macfarlane, Founder and CEO, said: “There is a transformation happening at European universities, as the world’s best talent is deciding to pursue entrepreneurship. The RnD and technology emerging from our labs and classrooms has the potential to fundamental change and improve the way we live and work. Our primary goal at Creator Fund is to be there early on, helping truly innovative PhD students build tech businesses based on scientific discovery or engineering innovation.

"Second to that is the training of a diverse range of the next generation of investors. In the last two years I am proud to watch our portfolio companies thrive and our student investors become part of Europe’s best VCs, join our companies, and become LPs in CF”.  

This fund fuels Creator Fund’s ambition to be Europe’s leading early-stage investor in disruptive technology coming from universities. Creator Fund invests in students and professors building businesses “on the frontier of what’s possible”. Its 16 investments to date include frontier technologies that develop mutation-proof vaccines, electronic skin for robots, brainwave-reading software to control machines and self-flying drones. Creator Fund finds deals at an extremely early stage and has proven that it can help those companies raise large follow-on rounds, such as:

• BaseImmune - Imperial College-based life sciences firm recently raised £3.5m, led by Hoxton Ventures, for its development of mutation-proof vaccines. Creator Fund found the company in the lab and led a small pre-seed round.
• Touchlab -  Edinburgh-based company developing electronic skin for robots giving machines the power of human touch. Creator Fund led their pre-seed round after discovering the founder in the Edinburgh robotics lab, and Octopus led a £3.5m seed round last month. 
• RecyclEye - PhDs in Machine Vision creating recycling plants that can sort rubbish automatically raised a £3.4m seed round from US investors after Creator Fund’s pre-seed round. 

Ari Gomes, Founder of Baseimmune, said: “Creator Fund has been a driving force in getting us to where we are today! They helped our PhD founding team transition from the lab bench to running the company. From setting strategy, to making key introductions, and even helping us to grow personally and professionally. We feel much more confident with them."

Creator Fund has over 70 LPs including the founders of companies including Wayve, Lastminute.com, Faculty, SuperAwesome, and Privitar. It has also been backed by the GPs of a number of leading European investment firms, including Kindred Capital, firstminute.capital, Elkstone, MMC Ventures, and Episode1. It has also been backed by Rockmount Capital, Basecamp, and BWC. Founders Factory and Lord Rumi Verjee are founding investors. 

Lord Rumi Verjee, an anchor investor in Fund II, said: “Creator Fund is unique in its purpose and approach. It has proven itself as a formidable force in identifying early founder and investor talent and nurturing it. I am thrilled to be supporting this grassroots investor.”