- Affinity Labs raised $2 million in a round led by Fuel Ventures to co-found software brands with creators.
- The 10-person team, based in the UK, is currently running three live apps and developing more, according to CEO Edoardo Ricci.
- As Ricci points out, the £497,787 Innovate UK grant, which accounted for about one third of the funding round, helped to reduce investment risk.
London-based startup Affinity Labs has raised $2 million to co-found, build, and scale a portfolio of AI-powered mobile apps directly with top digital creators.
Fuel Ventures led the round alongside Antler, and the funds included a £497,787 grant from Innovate UK. Angel investors from Google DeepMind, Meta, and Playfair VC also took part, along with Italian YouTuber Marcello Ascani and Devran Amaratunga Karaca, CEO of Kyra.
Further backers are Christian Arnstedt from Blazar Capital, Ryan Nelson from JOBI Brands, and Quentin Jayat from easyJet.
Edoardo Ricci, CEO and co-founder of Affinity Labs, said, “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.”
A Bending Spoons for creator-led apps
When comparing itself to other companies that support creators, Affinity Labs instead cites Bending Spoons.
“The company I most want to draw an analogy with is Bending Spoons,” Ricci tells Tech Funding News. The Milan-based firm, which raised $1.68 billion when it went public on the Nasdaq on July 1, manages several of its products through a single team.
“We are using technology at the heart of the organisation so as to build and run this portfolio of creator-led products on a large scale,” Ricci explains. The Affinity Labs product called Foundry provides important tools, including “automated UGC systems” and payment infrastructure.
The method benefits small teams. On October 12, Bending Spoons announced layoffs which impacted a large part of Airtable’s workforce, although the exact figures were not made public. Ricci reaches the same conclusion, stating that “we’re trying to use as few people as possible to operate and scale the biggest portfolio possible.”
Ricci argues that AI is turning software into a commodity and, as a result, making distribution more important than ever. He says creators have already proven themselves as distributors and that the next move should be for them to develop their own products.
Affinity Labs believes that software could take the same route as Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, which secured a deal valued at up to $1 billion.
Three founders who met at Antler
Ricci, Ahmed Eltom, chief operating officer, and Sunny Panchal, chief technology officer, met while Antler was in London.
The first amount Antler put in, the figure of which is not known, was meant to prove the concept. “We saw the Antler program and the money it provided as an opportunity to prove the concept,” Ricci says to TFN.
Hannah Leach, a partner at Antler, added, “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.”
It was one of the factors involved in the second funding round. “We were lucky enough to receive a £500,000 non-dilutive grant from Innovate UK, the UK government, and that gave investors the confidence to make their investment,” Ricci states. He also claims that Fuel Ventures, which closed a £100 million fund in 2023 and has supported Volt, is “a fantastic lead investor.”
Piers Lawford, a senior associate at Fuel Ventures, added, “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.”
Three live apps and the caveats
Ricci claims three products are currently live, with a fourth, Batootah, on a waitlist. Archives, the Islamic history app, has over 75,000 users, and the company says that its portfolio revenue has doubled every month for three months, even though it started from zero.
Ricci says products four to seven are already signed, and another is scheduled to launch by the end of the year. His aim is to have over 200 brands by the year 2030. The team consists of 10 members, all based in the UK.
Ricci is keeping an eye on the US market but is currently concentrating on the UK. He also notes that most of the competitors, such as Beach House Group, specialise in physical products: “The majority of competitors we’ve seen have focused on physical.”
The key challenge is whether audiences will continue to buy the new products. If they do, Affinity Labs could consolidate 200 brands, but if they don’t, the company might remain an app studio relying on external audiences.
