London-based Affinity Labs has raised a $2M (about £1.5M) pre-seed round led by Fuel Ventures, with Antler also investing. The round includes a £497,787 grant from Innovate UK, which makes up roughly a third of the total.
The startup is built on a simple observation: creators have audiences and trust, but rarely the engineering or infrastructure to turn them into software businesses. CEO Edoardo Ricci argues that AI is making software cheaper to build, which leaves distribution as the scarce resource. In his words, creators are “the most underleveraged founders in the world”.
Affinity Labs co-founds each product with a creator and runs it on shared tooling it calls an AI factory. Its Foundry platform handles common jobs such as automated user-generated content and payments, so a small team can operate many apps at once. Ricci compares the approach to Bending Spoons, the Milan-based app group that manages a large portfolio through a central team. Ricci and COO Ahmed Eltom founded the company with CTO Sunny Panchal after the three met on Antler’s London programme.
Ricci says three apps are live, with a fourth, Batootah, on a waitlist. Archives, an Islamic history app, has passed 75,000 users, and the company says portfolio revenue has doubled every month for three months, starting from zero. Ricci adds that products four to seven are already signed. The team numbers 10, all based in the UK. These figures come from the company and have not been independently verified.
Angel investors from Google DeepMind, Meta and Playfair VC also joined the round, as did Italian YouTuber Marcello Ascani and Devran Amaratunga Karaca, CEO of Kyra. The money will go towards expanding the portfolio, supporting existing products and strengthening the product, growth and engineering teams. Affinity Labs plans to launch its first products with US creators in late 2026 and wants more than 200 creator-led brands by 2030. The open question is whether audiences keep paying for creator-backed apps once the launch buzz fades.
Sources