Creator Fund raises £15m to back the student founders of tomorrow’s unicorns

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Early-stage venture capital (VC) investor Creator Fund has raised $20m (£15.3m) to invest in the student founders of tomorrow’s unicorns.

Creator Fund’s belief is that the next-generation of innovative deep technology startups will be forged in university classrooms, which is why the firm wants to invest in the brightest minds across the UK and Europe. As Creator Fund's website says, it is “Backing the future”, investing in areas such as robotics and quantum computing.

[Related reading: ‘UK a quantum computing leader’ - CEO of Cambridge Quantum]

When you consider that the likes of Facebook, Snapchat and Yahoo were all founded by students on university campuses, Creator Fund’s mission makes sense.

Since 2019 Creator Fund has invested in 16 startups – helping each of them secure further, larger investment – and this latest funding round is earmarked to help the VC firm extend its help to student across Europe, helping it realise its ambition of being “the partner for any student founder from Stockholm to Zurich to Cambridge”.

Something Unique about Creator Fund is its investors are also university students, which means they are in a fantastic position to find the founders of tomorrow’s unicorns on campus.

Jamie Macfarlane, founder and CEO of Creator Fund, said: “There is a transformation happening at European universities, as the world’s best talent is deciding to pursue entrepreneurship. The R&D and technology emerging from our labs and classrooms has the potential to fundamentally 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.”

Creator Fund’s portfolio includes startups founded in universities in Cambridge, Bath and Edinburgh.

Previously, the VC firm has backed the likes of visual machine learning startup Tenyks, brain-to-machine interface company Cogitat and Touchlab, a startup developing electronic skin for robots.

Image credit: Creator Fund