Creator Fund has hit a first close of $41m for its first institutional fund targeting PhD founders across Europe.
The investor, which backs companies created by academics at some of the region’s top universities, is targeting a $55m final close in January 2026.
Creator Fund was founded in 2019 to back the next generation of leading deeptech startups emerging from Europe's universities. It raised a $20m fund in 2022 after a first fund of $5m in January 2021, and is looking to tap into a growing trend across Europe of investors scouring the region’s universities for the next big thing.
The new fund will make 40-45 investments, with an average cheque size of $500k, and a maximum of $900k. The $41m took a year to raise, Jamie Macfarlane, Creator Fund’s founder, tells Sifted.
The new fund is anchored by German asset manager Equation Capital and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO). They are joined by more than 60 other limited partners, including Blue Wire Capital, the Phoenix Court Group’s fund of funds Basecamp and Skaala — the investment firm founded by early Skype employees Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi.
The most Creator Fund has raised in the past to back PhD founders in mainland Europe is $500k from a single LP. Its two previous investment vehicles were EIS and SEIS funds in the UK, which restricted it from investing outside of Britain.
Creator Fund has made four investments so far out of its new vehicle, including Ovo Labs, a spinout from Germany’s Max Planck Institute which is working on tech to reverse the age decline of the human egg, and Sphotonix, a company founded by academics from the University of Southampton and the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne which uses precision lasers to engrave data into glass to provide secure storage.
“Our universities are every bit as good as those in the US and China,” Macfarlane tells Sifted, pointing out particular expertise across robotics, AI and genetics.
The most attractive opportunities differ geographically, Macfarlane says. “In Glasgow they’re building amazing chemistry businesses, we see really good AI in Eindhoven, in Stockholm they’re building really interesting biotech businesses.”
Physics labs are hot property too, he says — anything in photonics, chip design and the compute stack.
Creator Fund’s model involves using students to scout deals. It has 40-50 students across 24 universities in eight countries. Each student is put through a 16-part training programme that teaches them things including how to start a company, how to turn IP into a business and how VC works.
Macfarlane tells Sifted when it first started using this model he expected a lot of the students to go into investment roles, but over time more of them have started to found their own businesses into which Creator Fund has invested.
To date Creator Fund has had two exits returning capital to its earliest backers, including the sale of Loci to Epic Games in May.
