Jamie Macfarlane’s Post

Huge well done to the entire team at Versed AI on their sale to Exiger today. It is a testament to the vision of the founders and the product they've built leveraging natural language processing to audit complex supply chains. Above all Fenella Boyle has been a rock, and brilliant in leading this acquisition from start-to-finish - congratulations! A good milestone for Creator Fund, with our first exit.

Advances in Large Language Models have significant implications for Pharma, and we love backing teams who bring together technical experience in AI & Biotech. Proud to join the Helical pre-seed round - a team training LLMs on RNA and DNA data. Our first investment in Luxembourg 🇱🇺 and born out of Imperial College London innovation. Proud that Creator Fund has backed Maxime Allard and Rick Schneider. Investing alongside Frst and the founders of Hugging Face and Cohere and 2014 German World Cup winner Mario Götze. Alexandra Ntemourtsidou & Pedro Lovatt Garcia.

We are proud to announce our £6 million seed round at Malted AI. The team is building task-specific language models that address the ballooning costs of AI. They achieve this through the power of distillation: using large models to train small ones. Most excitingly for me, it's an Edinburgh based team bringing together three top PhDs from University of Glasgow and drawing on Scotland's long history of excellence in Computer Science. Creator Fund was proud to lead the pre-seed in August, and excited to invest again now alongside our friends at Hoxton Ventures Huge congrats to Iain Mackie, Carlos Gemmell and Federico Rossetto as they take a big step forward on Iain's mission to build "the biggest company in Scottish history" 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 . https://lnkd.in/eFHdaqn6 Al Giles Rob Barker Bryan Gartner Laura Moross Jeff Dalton Sandy Nairn

In my previous career in political consulting, I saw all the time how hard it is to accurately poll electorates (just look at how wrong polls got the 2016 US Presidential election or Brexit referendum). And while you might get a (fairly) accurate understanding of an overall population, it's extremely hard to know what a sub-population thinks and believes. Very proud that Creator Fund backed Samuel Cohen, Michael Cohen and Benny Schnaider at pre-seed (led by my partner Alexandra Ntemourtsidou) in 2022. Fairgen use advanced mathematics and artificial intelligence to provide precise tools for brands and politicians to understand what populations believe and think through the power of synthetic data. It blends on PhD research from UCL with Israeli leadership in the field. Huge congratulations as they announce their $5.5 million seed round! https://lnkd.in/eRpeSib6

In today's Financial Times, Baseimmune announce their £9 million Series A from Merck and Co, and IQ. The unstoppable trio of Joshua Blight, Ariane C. Gomes, and phillip kemlo are a pathogen's worst nightmare, as they use AI to predict how it will first mutate, and then develop antigens based on this intelligence. Back in 2021, Joshua Blight, Adrian Signell and I sat at a white board in our old offices, brainstorming names for where the final £10k would come from to close out the Baseimmune pre-seed round. Fast forward 3 years and it is incredible to see this team close their Series A and be at the forefront of innovation for the way the world eradicates disease. Huge congrats from all of us at Creator Fund.

Huge congratulations to Tom Hamer 🦛 and Jesse N. Clark as they announce their $12.5mm Series A round led by Lightspeed. It's been less than 2 years since we met Marqo at a founder match-making night in Cambridge. Very proud to be on this journey with Creator Fund - as two men down under 🇦🇺 transform the way the world 🌍 searches for goods on e-commerce sites through their vector database.

Shine bright like a diamond 💎 ! Excited for Creator Fund to make our first investment in Germany 🇩🇪 into QuantumDiamonds. The brilliant Kevin Berghoff and team have developed quantum sensing technology that uses synthetic diamonds and allows semiconductor manufacturers to inspect and optimise chip design at scale. Truly transformative innovation born out of Technical University of Munich. https://lnkd.in/e7xVREtJ

School is in session! Back for Year 4. Teaching the Venture Capital & Social Impact Investing course at Queen Mary University of London with my brilliant teaching partner Professor Dr Joanne J. Zhang. 

A beautiful obituary in The Times (the paper she read every day) about my grandmother's remarkable life: How she didn't tell her family for 30 years that she worked at Bletchley, and how she believed any good deed should be answered with a bottle of whisky. Non paywall version in the comments.