He Just Raised $2 Million on a Bet That Your Audience Would Rather Buy an App Than Another Course

Olivia Bowen took an interior design course during lockdown. Her interest grew partly because followers kept asking for advice after seeing what she'd done to her own home.

The obvious move was to sell them a course of her own. She shipped an app instead.

Interior Design Clinic, built with her, reached number 34 in the App Store's Lifestyle category. It's an AI tool: upload a photo of a room, describe the look you want, get photorealistic redesigns of your actual space. Free to download, free credits to start, paid plans to unlock more.

The company behind it just raised money on the idea that this is the better trade for almost every creator with an audience.

The round

London-based Affinity Labs announced a $2 million pre-seed today, led by Fuel Ventures alongside Antler, including a £497,787 grant from Innovate UK. Angels came from Google DeepMind, Meta and Playfair VC, plus content creator Marcello Ascani and Devran Amaratunga Karaca, CEO of creator economy company Kyra. Christian Arnstedt of Blazar Capital, Ryan Nelson of JOBI Brands and easyJet's Quentin Jayat also took part.

The grant matters more than it looks. It accounted for roughly a third of the round, and CEO Edoardo Ricci says the non-dilutive money "gave investors the confidence to make their investment."

Ricci runs the company with COO Ahmed Eltom and CTO Sunny Panchal, a trio who met at Antler.

The model: co-found, don't sponsor

Affinity Labs doesn't take a fee and it doesn't sell ad slots. It co-founds each product alongside a creator, pairing their existing audience with the company's technology. An in-house "AI factory" and shared infrastructure automate the product development lifecycle.

Ricci's framing is the part course creators should sit with: "Creators are the most underleveraged founders in the world." They have audience, trust and loyalty, he argues, and what they've lacked is the infrastructure to turn that into value — so every brand launches with organic distribution that consumer products normally spend years buying.

His comparison isn't MrBeast or Jellysmack. "The company I most want to draw an analogy with is Bending Spoons," he told Tech Funding News — the Milan firm that raised $1.68 billion going public on the Nasdaq on 1 July and runs several products through a single team. Ricci: "we're trying to use as few people as possible to operate and scale the biggest portfolio possible."

Affinity's internal version is called the Foundry — notification systems, payment rails, growth systems, the plumbing every new product plugs into.

The numbers, and the caveat

Tech.eu reports four creator-led brands launched to date, including Archives with Basel Ghazoghli, which has passed 75,000 users and ranked in the top 200 of the Education category. Tech Funding News reports a 10-person team currently running three live apps with more in development. That gap is worth noting rather than smoothing over.

Affinity says portfolio revenue has grown an average of 100% month on month over the past three months — a number from a small base, unaudited, and supplied by the company.

Ricci says products four through seven are already signed, another launches by the end of the year, and the target is more than 200 brands by 2030.

What's actually being tested

A course monetises the moment someone wants to learn what you know. An app monetises every moment after. One is a one-time transaction attached to a launch calendar; the other is a subscription attached to a habit.

The bet underneath this round is that the same trust converts both ways. It might not. An audience that buys your teaching has agreed to listen to you — that's not the same as agreeing to let you solve a problem for them every day, at a monthly price, in a category where their alternatives are free.

Affinity's own rule, per Ricci, is that each product should stand as a viable business even without the creator attached.

Which is the quiet admission in the whole thesis. The audience gets you to launch. After that, the product has to be good.