Last year almost all venture capital in the creator economy went to North America. According to the New Market Pitch tracker, the 2025 market year ended with 91.2% of all capital in the sector there, roughly $1.52 billion. So far this year, to the end of May, most of the announced capital has gone to Europe. It accounted for 61.4%, and European firms closed six of the nine rounds tracked. Together they come to $36 million.
New Market Pitch tracks publicly announced equity rounds of $300,000 and above at companies that fall within its definition of pure-play creator economy, and verifies them against company announcements, press releases and established media.
The focus is on monetisation and AI tools
The largest European round this year was announced in January by London-based Fanvue, a direct-to-fan monetisation platform with AI tools. A Series A of $22 million was led by the Inner Circle fund. Investors include Moonbug founder René Rechtman and the founders of the British unicorn Marshmallow. Fanvue reports 250,000 creators, 17 million monthly active users and an annualised revenue run rate of around $100 million. “Announcing two major milestones for the business, the Series A and Alisha, in the same week, reinforces our vision that AI will enable the next generation of athletes and creators to build businesses and create new revenue streams on direct-to-fan monetisation platforms like Fanvue,” said co-founder and CEO Will Monange, as reported by The AI Insider.
In February, London-based Mozart AI, which is building a generative audio workstation for music creation, added a $6 million seed round. The round was led by the European fund Balderton Capital, and angel investors include Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz and Frame.io co-founder Emery Wells. The company reports over 100,000 users within two months of its beta and one million songs created. “AI is impacting every industry, and music is no different. The companies that win will be those that work with and for musicians, not against them,” said Balderton General Partner Daniel Waterhouse about the investment.
Where the money goes
Alongside London, money is also flowing to Madrid and Tallinn. MITO AI, headquartered in Madrid and San Francisco, closed a $4.5 million pre-seed round in January, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Kfund, Kibo, Sequoia and a16z scouts. It is building a collaborative platform for AI video, where filmmakers and creative teams work in one browser environment with video, image and audio models and professional editing. Estonia's Pickmybrain raised a $2.1 million pre-seed round in April and is building “digital brains” for experts, meaning AI doubles trained on their knowledge. These handle routine questions and pass the more complex ones on to a human via asynchronous video.
Fanvue and Pickmybrain sell infrastructure for direct monetisation, while Mozart AI and MITO AI provide tools for producing content. None of them is building a new social network. Mozart AI and MITO AI also target categories where generative players such as Suno in music and Runway in video already compete globally.
The tracker's figures confirm that new social platforms are not this year's focus. The new platforms category accounted for 22.2% of announced rounds but only 2.7% of capital. The only representative of this category among European rounds is the British company Luupli, a collaborative publishing platform with early traction in Ghana, which in February closed a pre-seed of £444,000 from angel investors. It is the smallest round and the only one without an institutional fund.
Small early bets dominate
The tracker also shows that first funding accounted for 66.7% of cases this year, compared with 17.2% for the whole of 2025. These are therefore mostly small early bets.
This year's data also covers only the first five months, while last year's covers the full year, so direct comparisons of totals should be treated with caution. No announced round this year has yet reached the size of the large American rounds of last year.
This year's rounds are led by global funds such as Lightspeed, Sequoia, Balderton and Kfund. The companies taking the money look like ordinary technology startups. They are building monetisation infrastructure and AI tools whose customer is the individual creator.
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