{"id":1014202,"date":"2026-06-09T00:08:22","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T00:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1014202\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T00:08:22","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T00:08:22","slug":"the-man-who-brought-silicon-valleys-student-vc-model-to-europe-just-raised-56m-backed-by-the-german-and-danish-governments-tfn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1014202\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who brought Silicon Valley&#8217;s student VC model to Europe just raised $56M, backed by the German and Danish governments \u2014 TFN"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Creator Fund has closed a $56 million fund, the largest student-backed VC fund in the world, to back European PhD founders before they have a pitch deck, a product, or even a company name.<\/li>\n<li>KfW Capital, the investment arm of Germany\u2019s state-owned promotional bank, joins as the fund\u2019s largest investor, alongside the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark and 69 other LPs from 21 countries.<\/li>\n<li>Two Creator Fund portfolio companies have surpassed $100 million in total funding in the past six months, and the firm returned its first fund last year when Loci was acquired by Epic Games.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In 2021, a Creator Fund scout found a Cambridge computer science thesis online. The student, Jack Davis, had built an immersive world out of a Roger Federer tennis match using neural rendering, with no company, no co-founder, no deck. <\/p>\n<p>Creator Fund backed him anyway, helped him build a business around it, and four years later, Epic Games bought the result. That is the fund\u2019s entire thesis compressed into one deal: reach the scientist before the idea becomes obvious, and before anyone else picks up the phone.<\/p>\n<p>UK-based Creator Fund has closed a $56 million fund, the <a href=\"https:\/\/thecreatorfund.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">largest student-backed VC fund<\/a> in the world, according to the firm, with 71 limited partners from 21 countries. <\/p>\n<p>KfW Capital, the venture arm of KfW, Germany\u2019s state development bank, is the fund\u2019s largest investor.  The Export and Investment Fund of Denmark also committed an allocation. Other limited partners include Equation Capital, Basecamp, JIMCO, and Allocator One.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The founder<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/uk.linkedin.com\/in\/jamiemacfarlane\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Jamie Macfarlane<\/a> spent years running election campaigns for political leaders across more than 12 countries before switching to venture capital. <\/p>\n<p>He joined Raine Ventures in San Francisco, then went to Stanford for his MBA, where he led the Dorm Room Fund, the Silicon Valley student investment model that Creator Fund is modelled on. <\/p>\n<p>Macfarlane launched the Creator Fund in 2019 after concluding that Europe\u2019s universities were producing world-class science but lacked a reliable mechanism to translate it into companies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How it works<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Rather than waiting for PhD founders to find their way to a VC firm, Creator Fund embeds itself on campus. It recruits 40 Venture Fellows each year from roughly 450 applicants: students who receive carried interest and are trained to identify researchers with founder potential across <a href=\"https:\/\/techfundingnews.com\/uk-based-creator-fund-raises-41m-to-back-europes-deep-tech-phd-founders\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">30 universities in 10 countries.<\/a> <\/p>\n<p>Over 250 students have gone through the 20-part Scientific Founder curriculum. Three of the first 11 investments from the new fund were started by former fellows. The firm has backed 62 companies in total since 2019, with portfolio companies raising over $250 million in follow-on funding.<\/p>\n<p>Two companies in that portfolio have now crossed $100 million in total funding.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What is it backing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The new fund has made 11 investments. <\/p>\n<p>Ovo Labs is working to reverse the biological clock on human eggs. SPhotonix encodes data onto quartz glass using ultrafast lasers, and Elon Musk has used it for what he calls an intergalactic data library. <\/p>\n<p>Anzen Industries produces materials that do not exist in nature, built through enzyme reactions. Latent Worlds builds robots that map remote environments beyond the reach of conventional infrastructure. Apian, on whose board Macfarlane sits, operates medical drones carrying blood samples across London.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe scientists working on them are extraordinary, but for too long, they\u2019ve been overlooked by venture capital, pushed towards academia rather than building companies,\u201d says Macfarlane.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy leveraging Creator\u2019s 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,\u201d adds Christian R\u00f6hle, co-head of investment management, KfW Capital.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe brightest PhD minds come to Creator Fund to learn how to build companies. They found businesses we back, or they join our portfolio as top technical talent. Others go into VC and invest in our companies in follow-on rounds,\u201d notes Alexandra Ntemourtsidou, COO, Creator Fund.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The competition<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Several funds are chasing the same university spinout opportunity in Europe. <\/p>\n<p>U2V, the ex-Earlybird team, <a href=\"https:\/\/techfundingnews.com\/u2v-60m-fund-deep-tech-spinouts-europe\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">closed a \u20ac60 million fund<\/a> in December 2025, targeting pre-seed deep tech spinouts, but uses a conventional investment team rather than embedded student scouts. Oxford Science Enterprises and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures are captive university funds with geographic constraints. <\/p>\n<p>Denmark\u2019s Delphinus VC launched an <a href=\"https:\/\/techfundingnews.com\/delphinus-vc-launches-80m-fund-for-deep-tech-spinouts\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">\u20ac80 million evergreen fund<\/a> for research-heavy startups. Creator Fund\u2019s edge lies not just in the size of its network but in the early relationships it builds with founders before any other funds are even aware a company exists.<\/p>\n<p>With deep tech attracting $121 billion globally in 2024, the question this raise puts to the European deep tech ecosystem is whether a student-sourcing network operating across 30 campuses can find the next ones before the science becomes obvious enough for everyone else to notice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Creator Fund has closed a $56 million fund, the largest student-backed VC fund in the world, to back&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1014203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3094],"tags":[51,16547,3134,12,16,15,156312],"class_list":["post-1014202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-deeptech","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-vc-funding"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116717244095402402","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1014203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1014202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}