“I’ve got a pretty wild story to tell you,” the early YouTube star Caspar Lee says in a TikTok.
He goes on to tell the story of how a startup founder slid into his LinkedIn DMs with a pitch about an eco-friendly deodorant called Wild. He ignored the message at first, but his cousin Sasha Kaletsky, then a Bridgepoint investor, asked Lee if he and some other creators wanted to get in on the seed round. This April, about five and a half years later, Wild sold to Unilever for £233 million, or around $286 million.
Wild would be just the tip of the iceberg for Kaletsky and Lee. In 2019, they formed Creator Ventures, a seed and pre-seed venture capital fund focused on consumer internet companies. Now Creator Ventures is launching its second fund with $45 million, more than double its previous $20 million fund.
Creator Ventures already has a track record of making some solid bets on seed-stage startups. ElevenLabs, an AI audio company now valued at over $3.3 billion, was part of Creator Ventures’ Fund I. Soon after Unilever acquired Wild, another Creator Ventures-backed company, Runna, exited to exercise-tracking app Strava. The firm has also invested in buzzy newsletter platform Beehiiv, and it led AI language learning app Praktika‘s seed round.
After six years working with its first fund, the Creator Ventures Fund II will continue investing in consumer-facing companies, but with a closer eye on AI — that’s not a surprise to hear in 2025.
“There’s a trillion dollars of spend that goes through the iOS and Android app stores every year, and if even a small proportion of that becomes taken by consumer AI apps, that’s going to be a whole lot of unicorns,” Kaletsky told TechCrunch.
Aside from the interest in AI, Kaletsky sees some other burgeoning trends in the consumer internet space. He’s particularly interested in microdrama streaming apps, which have long been popular in Asian markets but have started making a real dent in the U.S.
“The crazy part about ReelShort, which is fascinating, is the pricing,” Kaletsky said. “People sometimes don’t realize they’re charging $20 a week … it’s far more expensive than Netflix.”
So far this year, according to app store data provider Appfigures, the microdrama apps DramaBox and ReelShort have made $99 million and $152 million from in-app purchases in the U.S., respectively. Those figures reflect a 203% and a 233% year-over-year growth, respectively, from the same time frame in 2024.
Some of Creator Ventures’ bets are a bit more speculative. Kaletsky and Lee are also excited about an app in their portfolio called Status, a social network-like app where users post updates to an audience of AI bots, meaning that no one actually sees what they post. The bots might love your posts or cancel you. The company markets itself as “Sims but social media.”
These AI bot-filled social network startups have been cropping up over the last year, though to a skeptic, the appeal of AI-only social experiences may seem dubious. But according to Creator Ventures, Status has over 1 million global users after launching earlier this year.
Though Creator Ventures isn’t necessarily a creator economy fund, the entrepreneurial parallels between startup founders and content creators like Lee remain at the center of the firm’s vision.
“A lot of consumer internet founders find that the real exciting go-to-market strategy is around social,” Lee said. “A lot of these founders are becoming creators in their own right … and that’s something I love to get involved in as someone who comes from that world.”
Fund II is propped up by Level, Cendana, Vintage, Isomer Capital, Sequoia, and other partners. Kaletsky said that some of the Fund II backers hadn’t invested in consumer-dedicated funds in over 10 years.
“I think, hopefully, people are starting to see the potential of consumer in this era,” Kaletsky said.
Lee added, “It’s nice for us to be able to invest in things that our friends and family can come across.”