Affinity Labs raises $2M pre-seed funding to build the world's largest house of creator-led software brands
Written by Christina Levada
Affinity Labs, the AI software builder for creators, has today announced a $2M pre-seed funding round. The London-based startup is a new house of creator-led software brands, launching and scaling products co-founded with leading content creators.
The round was led by Fuel Ventures, alongside Antler, and includes a £497,787 grant from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), awarded through its competitive Growth Catalyst: Investor Partnerships programme.
They are joined by angel investors from Google DeepMind, Meta, and Playfair VC, alongside content creator Marcello Ascani (@marcelloascani, 2m+ followers) and Devran Amaratunga Karaca, CEO of creator economy company Kyra.
Affinity Labs builds software products with content creators, combining the creator's built-in fan base with proprietary technology to launch and scale new digital brands quickly.
Affinity Labs' wider backers include Christian Arnstedt, CEO of Blazar Capital, the venture studio behind Emma Chamberlain's Chamberlain Coffee; Ryan Nelson, co-founder of JOBI Brands, which has launched consumer brands with Courteney Cox and Kaley Cuoco; and Quentin Jayat, Head of Design at easyJet.
The creator economy is projected to approach half a trillion dollars by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs Research. Creators have already built category-defining consumer brands in drinks, beauty, and
food, from Skims by Kim Kardashian ($5b valuation) to Rhode by Haily Bieber ($1b exit), but software remains largely untapped.
Affinity Labs is applying that same proven playbook to software. The company has launched four creator-led brands to date, with notable examples including Interior Design Clinic, co-founded with Olivia Bowen, which reached No. 34 in the App Store's Lifestyle category, and Archives, co-founded with creator Basel Ghazoghli, which has passed 75,000 users and is ranked in the Top 200 in the highly competitive Education Category on the App Store. Revenue across the portfolio has averaged
100% month-on-month growth over the last three months.
The funding will be used to expand Affinity Labs' portfolio of creator-led brands, including the company's first launches with US creators in late 2026, to double down on its fastest-growing existing products, and to grow the product, growth and engineering teams.
A significant share of the investment, including the £497,787 Innovate UK grant, is going into the company's proprietary AI factory: technology that automates as much of the product development lifecycle as possible, from identifying what to build and which creator to build it with, through to growing, operating and scaling each product.
Every launch makes the system smarter, so each new brand is built faster and runs more efficiently than the last. The company's ambition is to build the world's largest house of creator-led software brands,
targeting over 200 brands by 2030. Affinity Labs has also signed its next creator partners, including Saudi lifestyle creator @yasmeen_alshafai and New York-based travel creator @isaaclikes_, with their products launching in the coming months.
Edoardo Ricci, CEO and co-founder of Affinity Labs, comments, “Creators are the most underleveraged founders in the world. They have the audience, the trust and the loyalty but what they have lacked is the infrastructure to turn that into value. Affinity Labs exists to be that infrastructure, we co-found every product with a leading creator and put our AI factory behind it, so each brand launches with the built-in organic distribution that consumer products typically spend years building. This funding lets us scale what we have proven with our first brands and takes us one step closer to our long-term ambition of building the world's largest house of creator-led software brands.”
Piers Lawford, Senior Associate at Fuel Ventures, comments, “The playbook for building consumer software companies is changing, the next generation will solve for distribution from day one, and that is exactly what Affinity Labs has done with their creator partners, who already own the world's attention. They pair that distribution with serious commercial and AI engineering pedigree, and the early traction across their first four brands shows the model working. This is exactly the kind of ambitious, category-defining team we back, and we believe Affinity Labs can lead this market globally.”
Affinity Labs was founded by Edoardo Ricci (CEO), Ahmed Eltom (COO) and Sunny Panchal (CTO), who met during Antler's London residency. The team brings experience from Oliver Wyman, Amazon and London Business School, alongside operating roles at startups backed by Y Combinator and Peter Thiel.
Eltom has worked with more than 1,000 creators on growth while running his own DTC brands, and as Chief of Staff took a startup from zero to $1M ARR in a year. Panchal has architected B2C and enterprise AI platforms in some of the world's most regulated industries. Ricci, a second-time founder, has scaled SaaS products from zero to six-figure recurring revenues within months across a series of seed-stage startups.
Hannah Leach, Partner at Antler, comments, “Edo, Ahmed and Sunny represent the ideal founding team to execute on this vision, blending deep technical execution with exceptional commercial drive. By pairing top-tier creator distribution with a scalable group-level AI engine, Affinity Labs is creating a brand-new playbook for software creation. We backed them from inception because we saw their potential to reshape how software brands are launched and scaled, and we are delighted to continue supporting them as they expand globally.”
About Affinity Labs
Affinity Labs is a house of creator-led software brands, launching and scaling products each co-founded with a leading content creator. Each brand pairs a creator's community and expertise with the company's AI-native product-building engine, allowing new software products to be identified, built, launched and scaled faster than traditional startups. Founded in London in July 2025, Affinity Labs has launched four brands to date, including Interior Design Clinic with Olivia Bowen and Archives with @baselgazi, and is backed by Fuel Ventures, Antler and Innovate
UK. The company's ambition is to build the world's largest house of creator-led software brands, targeting over 200 brands by 2030. Learn more at https://affinitylabs.ai/.
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