A London startup raised $2 million today on a bet that should make every coach with a half-finished course pause: the most valuable thing an expert owns isn't content. It's distribution — and it's currently being wasted on PDFs.

Affinity Labs closed a $2 million pre-seed led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Antler, plus a £497,787 grant from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation. CEO Edoardo Ricci says the Innovate UK grant accounted for roughly a third of the round — the rest included angels from Google DeepMind, Meta and Playfair VC, Italian YouTuber Marcello Ascani, Kyra CEO Devran Amaratunga Karaca, Christian Arnstedt of Blazar Capital, Ryan Nelson of JOBI Brands and Quentin Jayat of easyJet.

The company doesn't license creator names. It co-founds companies with them.

What No. 34 actually looked like

Affinity Labs has launched four creator-led brands so far. Interior Design Clinic, developed with Olivia Bowen, reached number 34 in the App Store's Lifestyle category. Archives, co-founded with Basel Ghazoghli, has passed 75,000 users and ranked inside the top 200 in Education.

Interior Design Clinic is not a membership or a video library. Users photograph a room, describe what they want fixed, and the app returns tailored design options built around layout, lifestyle and budget — modelled, the listing says, on how Bowen designs her own spaces. It sells weekly and annual subscriptions, with three free credits for new users.

Affinity Labs says revenue across its portfolio has grown by an average of 100 per cent month on month over the past three months. That figure is the company's own and hasn't been independently audited.

Bowen's line on the website is the part most coaches will recognise instantly: "People asked me about design apps for years. I had no idea how to build one."

The pitch

"Creators are the most underleveraged founders in the world," Ricci said. "They have the audience, the trust and the loyalty, but what they have lacked is the infrastructure to turn that into value. Affinity Labs exists to be that infrastructure, we co-found every product with a leading creator and put our AI factory behind it, so each brand launches with the built-in organic distribution that consumer products typically spend years building."

The comparison Ricci reaches for is Bending Spoons — the Milan firm that raised $1.68 billion in its Nasdaq listing on 1 July and runs multiple products through one team.

The process is unromantic and worth stealing regardless of whether you ever meet a VC. Affinity backs one creator per product — a genuine expert with an audience that trusts them on a specific topic — and writes no code until demand is proven, testing with a waitlist, a Figma prototype and paid ads first. Only then does it build the company rather than just the app, currently shipping a functional product in four to eight weeks.

The part nobody puts on the landing page

The equity split isn't public. Neither is what a creator actually takes home.

And the funnel is narrow by design. Affinity says it partners with a handful of creators a year. Bowen brings 2.9 million followers to Interior Design Clinic, and more than five million overall. This is not a model that rescues an audience of 4,000.

The team is 10 people in the UK, with three live apps and more in development, according to Ricci. Ricci is CEO; Ahmed Eltom is COO and Sunny Panchal is CTO.

What changed today isn't that one app charted. It's that institutional money now agrees an expert's audience is worth more as a product with equity attached than as a launch sequence.