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.
KfW Capital, the investment arm of Germany’s state-owned promotional bank, joins as the fund’s largest investor, alongside the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark and 69 other LPs from 21 countries.
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.
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.
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’s entire thesis compressed into one deal: reach the scientist before the idea becomes obvious, and before anyone else picks up the phone.
