Affinity Labs, a London startup that builds apps hand in hand with online creators, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with Antler also taking part, and it is topped up by a £497,787 grant from Innovate UK, the government's innovation agency, which covers close to a third of the total.
The pitch is simple to state and hard to pull off. Affinity Labs co-founds a software product with a creator who already has an audience, then runs the building, launching and scaling itself through what it calls an AI factory. The creator brings the trust and the distribution. Affinity brings the technology and the operations. Each side owns a stake in the result.
What Affinity Labs actually does
Chief executive and co-founder Edoardo Ricci frames the gap his company is trying to fill in blunt terms. "Creators are the most underleveraged founders in the world," he said. "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."
The model borrows from consumer goods, where creator-led brands in beauty, food and drink have become normal. A YouTuber launches a skincare line, a chef launches a sauce. Affinity is trying to do the same thing for software, where the equivalent has barely existed, because building an app is harder than bottling a product and most creators cannot do it alone.
Underneath sits an internal system Affinity calls its Foundry, which automates stages of the product lifecycle: spotting a concept, matching it to a creator, then building, running and scaling the app with as little manual work as possible. Ricci's argument is that AI has made the software itself close to a commodity, so the thing that actually decides whether a consumer app wins is distribution. A creator with a loyal audience supplies that distribution on day one, which is the expensive part for any normal startup.
The Bending Spoons comparison
Ricci reaches for a specific comparison: Bending Spoons, the Milan company that runs a large portfolio of apps, from Evernote to Meetup, through one lean central team. Affinity wants the same shape, a single team operating many products, but with each brand carried into the market by a creator rather than acquired and optimised after the fact.
That lean philosophy runs through the operation. "We're trying to use as few people as possible to operate and scale the biggest portfolio possible," Ricci said. The team is ten people. The ambition is more than 200 creator-led software brands by 2030, which only makes sense if the AI tooling does most of the repetitive work.
Early traction, with the usual caveat
Affinity is not starting from zero. It has launched several creator-led apps already. Interior Design Clinic, built with Olivia Bowen, reached number 34 in the App Store's Lifestyle category. Archives, an Islamic history app co-founded with Basel Ghazoghli, has passed 75,000 users and ranked inside the top 200 in the Education category. A fourth app, Batootah, is on a waitlist, and the company says products five through seven are already signed.
The number that will catch an investor's eye is growth: Affinity says portfolio revenue has risen by an average of 100% month on month over the past three months. That is a striking figure, though it comes off a small base and over a short window, so it is a signal of momentum rather than a settled trend.
The honest open question is whether audiences keep buying. A creator can drive a spike of downloads at launch through sheer reach, but a software brand lives or dies on whether people stay and pay after the novelty fades. If retention holds across several apps, Affinity has a real portfolio machine. If it does not, it risks becoming an app studio that depends on renting attention from other people's audiences. The next few products will show which it is.
Who is backing it, and why it is a UK story
The investor list is a useful read on the thesis. Beyond Fuel Ventures and Antler, where the three founders met while the firm was running in London, the round drew angels from Google DeepMind, Meta and Playfair, alongside creator-economy names including the YouTuber Marcello Ascani and Devran Amaratunga Karaca, chief executive of the creator company Kyra. That mix of deep tech and creator operators mirrors the two things the business has to join up.
Hannah Leach, a partner at Antler, said the founders "represent the ideal founding team to execute on this vision." Piers Lawford of Fuel Ventures put the bet in market terms: "The playbook for building consumer software companies is changing."
The Innovate UK grant is the quietly important part for other founders to note. At close to £500,000 of non-dilutive money, it funded part of the AI development work and, by Ricci's account, gave the equity investors confidence to commit. Grant funding that de-risks a round is a route many UK startups overlook, and it sits alongside the wider pattern of government money flowing into British AI, from NVIDIA's compute commitment to the state's own venture bets. The company plans to launch its first products with US creators later in 2026, but the base, the team and the early money are British.
For UK founders, Affinity Labs is a small raise with an outsized idea behind it. If AI really does turn building software into the easy part, then distribution becomes the moat, and the people who already own audiences become the most valuable co-founders around. That is a bet on where consumer software is heading, and the next wave of apps will test whether it is right. It fits a wider run of early-stage momentum that has kept the UK second in global tech funding.
