Creator Fund, the early-stage VC fund backing PhD startups coming out of universities, has announced its expansion across 7 countries. This marks its launch in continental Europe for the first time. It is now the largest student-focused VC in the world with teams across 32 university campuses, with Estonia, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain, recently launching in the UK.
Creator Fund believes technical PhDs have the expertise to create Europe’s next generation of deep technology unicorns. The vast network of Creator Fund student investors from Tallinn to Cambridge find technological, engineering and entrepreneurial talent inside campus laboratories and classrooms, and invest up to €800k in companies with scientific founders.
This expansion across Europe coincides with Creator Fund’s first two investments in Europe: Turing Biosystems out of Lyon, France, and Enlightra, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Turing Biosystems uses artificial intelligence to identify the origin of cancer inside a tumour and works with pharmaceutical companies to develop more accurate drugs. The company is led by a team of childhood friends who started the company after both doing PhDs. Creator Fund led a €1 million round.
The second investment, Enlightra, develops next-gen multicolour laser technology enabling ultrafast and energy-efficient data transmission. The founding team have PhDs in Quantum and Atomic Physics.
Jamie Macfarlane, CEO of Creator Fund says: “There is incredible scientific talent at universities across Europe. Today we have scaled our team from Tartu at the EU’s eastern edge to Madrid in the west. Across the continent PhDs are driving cutting-edge breakthroughs in AI, robotics, and life science. This innovation should not stay on a bookshelf. We help PhD founders turn ideas into companies and have a team that looks far beyond the normal hubs to support founders at universities that often get missed.”
New student investor, Ilaria Incaviglia at ETH Zurich says: “The power of our European expansion is in the talent platform it builds across PhD programmes. I work from Switzerland on a deal within my PhD field based in Oxford or Stockholm, and we are able to connect our companies with technical hires from across European universities in a way nobody else can. We reach into degree programmes where the most interesting innovation is happening”.
Creator Fund has made 26 investments in pre-Seed and Seed deeptech firms, making it one of the most prolific early-stage deeptech investors on the continent.
The uniqueness of Creator Fund is its student investor model. It trains a largely PhD team to think like venture capitalists and identify opportunities in the laboratories and campuses around them. They now have a team of 45 students based across Europe. They have mapped out the university startup landscape and recruited students in the programmes where they have identified the most exciting innovation, like the Department of Biosystems Science in ETH Zurich or Machine Learning in Tallinn.
After graduating, Creator Fund student investors become founders, join the Creator Fund portfolio or join VC funds including Accel, APAX, firstminute.capital, MMC, and Octopus. The vision behind Creator Fund is to build the continent’s most powerful network of technical talent.
