In a good sign for consumer internet startups, Creator Ventures raises $45M

“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. Eleven Labs, an AI audio company now valued at over $3.3 billion, was part of Creator V ... Read full article.