Join Europe’s leading pre-seed investor in university startups, and help run a VC fund alongside your university degree. Every year, Creator Fund takes 50 students from across Europe and trains them to become venture capitalists and work on Deep Tech deals from start-to-finish. It is a unique path for students and PhD researchers who want to learn to found a business or join the VC industry when they graduate.
Applications are live for the 2024/25 cohort and will close on 15th September 2024. To apply you must be a PhD, Master’s, or Undergraduate student at a UK or European university in 2024-5:
<aside> 👉 **You can apply here.**
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Creator Fund invests in scientific founders building businesses on the frontier of what’s possible. To do this, we have a student team embedded in the best universities and programmes across Europe. Our student team meet potential founders first and often manages a deal from start-to-finish. They also contribute to our technical analysis, helping us analyse everything from LLMs to RNA.
You will be joining a team of 50 of the smartest PhDs across Europe, partnering across universities and countries to identify, analyse, and win deals. Many of our students will work with portfolio companies post-investment. We provide comprehensive “How to be a VC” and “How to build a company out of your PhD” training courses. And you will receive mentorship from experienced VC industry professionals. However, the most important learning comes from working on live deals.
Many students join Creator Fund because they want to found a company after their PhD. They want to learn how fundraising works and become a better founder by meeting hundreds of startups during their time with Creator Fund. Iain Mackie led our Scotland team for 3 years during his PhD at Glasgow, he then went on to found Malted AI (backed by Creator Fund), which has since raised £7.2mm in under a year.
We have two roles at Creator Fund (with one application form, roles are decided at the interview stage):
Both tracks offer unparalleled exposure to the European startup ecosystem. There is no other programme that gives you the opportunity to help lead an investment from start-to-finish and then often support the portfolio company afterwards.
This is not a salaried role. Instead, Student Investment Partners received carried interest in our funds (share of the profits when a company exits). Venture Fellows receive a £500 finders fee when we invest in a company they source. The Venture Fellowship is designed to be an educational program. All expenses are reimbursed.
Creator Fund is a $30mm AUM Deep Tech VC fund investing in startups across Europe’s leading universities. We believe that Europe’s next generation of unicorns will be founded by technical PhDs on university campuses. We currently have teams across 24 universities in 8 countries across Europe.
We have backed 40 companies at pre-seed and focus on Artificial Intelligence, BioTech, Compute Infrastructure, Advanced Materials, and Robotics.
Our portfolio includes AI-enabled computational fluid dynamics (£6.5mm Seed), mutation-proof vaccines (£9mm Series A), digital chemistry labs ($43mm Series A) and MLOps infrastructure for open-source biology foundational models (€2.2mm Seed, including founders of Cohere and Hugging Face).
We have been backed by 120+ investors, including leading later-stage VC funds. Our portfolio companies have received investment from VCs, including Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Lakestar, Hoxton, DCVC, Insight Partners, Blackbird, Adidas, Blue Yard Capital, Speedinvest, Merck, and UP.Partners. Our portfolio has raised £100mm+ in total follow-on funding.
For more information, **check out this Forbes article on Creator Fund.**