Creator Fund

"The biggest mistake that university investors can make is to focus on the technology and then bring in an external management team. We back massively motivated PhD founder teams.” Forbes explains the Creator Fund model in this excellent piece exploring what we have built over the past 3 years: https://lnkd.in/eMK58NWT

Applications are now open for our 2024/5 team 🚀 🔥 . Open for students across European universities: https://lnkd.in/emwA23Z4 Over the past 4 years, 150 students have been through our Venture Fellowship. Our alumni are now successful founders and working across top VC funds. CF is a unique opportunity to help run a VC fund alongside your studies, and it is a launchpad for turning your own PhD into a startup. You can learn more about the role & all about how CF works here: https://shorturl.at/qA0jk

Huge congratulations to Versed AI on their acquisition by Exiger today. This outcome is a result of the leadership and drive of Fenella Boyle, Simon B., and Hannah Tilston. Born out of the Computer Science lab at University of Cambridge, the team have built sophisticated tools that leverage AI to audit complex supply chains. This sale happens just 3 years after the Versed AI's pre-seed round. Well done above all to Fenella Boyle for successfully leading the close process. We are proud to have been a part of the Versed AI journey.

We are proud to join Helical's first round 🚀 . Helical brings together engineers and PhDs from Imperial College London to build foundational AI models for the pharmaceutical industry. They bridge advances in Biotech and Large Language Models to train next generation models on DNA and RNA data to power drug discovery. Congratulations to Rick Schneider and Maxime Allard - and excited to do our first Luxembourg-based deal 🇱🇺 . https://lnkd.in/d_Ckp_6k Alexandra Ntemourtsidou Pedro Lovatt Garcia

Over the last year and a half, we have scaled our PhD teams to universities across Europe. Recruiting students in the labs pioneering the most exciting research. And have invested in companies based in 🇳🇴 🇳🇱 🇩🇪 🇨🇭 🇫🇷 🇮🇱 . PhDs across Europe are uniquely positioned to build this continent's next generation of great deep technology business. Proud to have backed Lazy Dynamics, Fairgen, QuantumDiamonds, Myria Biosciences AG, Turing Biosystems, Enlightra, and Miphic (Techstars '24). Ilaria Incaviglia Leon Gibson Céline Caraffa Alexandra Ntemourtsidou Dávid Rozenberszki Meike Bleeksma Katariina Kordemets Dmitrii Usynin Yann Bouquet Erkin Najafli Massimiliano Casata Michał Bortkiewicz Callum Hill

Malted AI announces their £6 million seed round led by Hoxton Ventures. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🚀 The Edinburgh-based team are tackling the ballooning costs of large language models by building smaller task-specific models. We first backed Iain Mackie, Carlos Gemmell, and Federico Rossetto at pre-seed when they were finishing their PhDs at University of Glasgow. And we are very proud to invest again at the seed round. As the world focuses on ever bigger general models like ChatGPT, Malted AI believes most businesses actually need small task-specific models that can perform at near 100% accuracy. Malted is based on "distillation" (the focus of the team's AI PhDs) where the output of large models trains smaller models to do one task exceptionally well, at a fraction of the cost. Huge congrats to the team! https://lnkd.in/ee2ZheE5

We first met Samuel Cohen when he was finishing his PhD at UCL and were blown away by how he was solving advanced mathematics challenges to pioneer in the synthetic data field. We invested in Fairgen pre-seed round impressed also by the commercial vision being set by co-founders Michael Cohen and Benny Schnaider. Fast forward two years, and Fairgen has one of the most sophisticated solutions for modelling consumer populations and understanding what sub-groups think, believe, and want to buy. Important for brands, corporations, and political causes. Huge congratulations to the team as they announce their seed round! Alexandra Ntemourtsidou https://lnkd.in/epnvEHkA

Great piece in today's The Times from Brent Hoberman about how the 🇬🇧 is becoming a global leader in AI & Deep Tech. Brent also talks about Creator Fund and the role of 🇬🇧 universities for fostering this innovation: https://lnkd.in/eQxD_Qcn Alexandra Ntemourtsidou Adam Flanagan Jamie Macfarlane

20% of the companies we have backed in the UK are based at Scottish universities. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 has a huge density of PhD founder talent in AI and Life Science. That's why on the 14th May we are back with our famous PhD Founder Matchmaking event 🔥 . Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/etwG_QHF We will bring together PhD Founders from The University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow and Heriot-Watt University. Come see what the top scientific founders across Scotland are working on, meet a co-founder, or find talent to join your team. And hear live from Iain Mackie, CEO of Edinburgh-based Malted AI, which is building task-specific & distilled large language models. Louis Marlow Gautier Dagan Saniya Crouch John Fitzgerald Rohith Devanathan Simon D. Dougal Adamson Katharine Fox

Rosalyn Moran was the Deputy Head of Artificial Intelligence at King's College London when she realised that her research could solve major impediments to the way we train robots to understand the real world. Rosalyn left academia to found Stanhope AI to turn machines into embodied agents, which can act autonomously even in scenarios where they have no training data. Stanhope translates lessons from neuroscience to give robots the power of intuition. We were proud to back Rosalyn in her pre-seed round, alongside our friends at AlbionVC, MMC Ventures and Rockmount Seed Investments. Fernando Acero Alexandra Ntemourtsidou Elizabeth Zubanova Chris Kneale-Jones Jamie Macfarlane Sebastian Hunte https://lnkd.in/eukwhKsF