Building an app is becoming easier. Getting people to care about it is not.
That is the problem London-based Affinity Labs is building around. The startup has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding, led by Fuel Ventures alongside Antler, with the financing package also including a £497,787 Innovate UK grant. Angel participants include investors and operators from Google DeepMind, Meta and Playfair VC, alongside creator Marcello Ascani and Kyra CEO Devran Amaratunga Karaca.
Founded in 2025 by Edoardo Ricci, Ahmed Eltom and Sunny Panchal, Affinity does not hire creators to advertise software after it is built. It co-founds the product with them. The creator brings an audience, subject knowledge and distribution; Affinity handles product development, operations, growth and infrastructure. Companies House records all three founders as directors of Affinity Labs Ltd, incorporated in July 2025.
That difference matters because Affinity’s model starts before a line of production code is written. The company says it first identifies a problem inside a creator’s niche, validates demand using waitlists, Figma prototypes and paid advertising, and only then builds. The finished product launches directly into an audience that already knows the creator rather than spending months trying to manufacture distribution afterward.
Four products show what the model looks like in practice
The portfolio already stretches across very different consumer problems. Archives, built with history creator Basel Gazi, turns Islamic history into short daily lessons; its own site currently reports 70,000+ learners, 850,000+ lessons completed and users across 50 countries. Interior Design Clinic, created with Olivia Bowen, uses AI to redesign a room from a photo. NextStep, built with Consulting Comedy, matches consultants with potential exit roles through an AI agent. Batootah turns places saved from Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps or notes into AI-generated travel itineraries.
The products look unrelated on the surface. Underneath them sits the same operating thesis: reuse the software-building machinery while changing the creator, audience and problem.
Affinity calls that machinery The Foundry. Its internal stack includes an AI software factory called Dobby, autonomous QA agent Watchr, revenue-monitoring system Soledger, ad-testing engine Crucible and an orchestration layer called Lumis-Factory. Affinity says the stack helps it move from an idea to an MVP in one to two weeks and to a production-ready product in four to eight weeks. Those are company-reported operating claims, not independent benchmarks.
This is where the funding becomes more interesting than another creator-economy round. Affinity is trying to industrialize software creation without industrializing distribution. Its shared technology can be reused across brands, while each product still launches through a specific creator whose audience already understands the problem. The company currently reports 130,000+ users across its portfolio, more than 100 million content views and a 4.9-star average across app stores.
There is still an important scaling question. Affinity says it works with only a handful of creators each year today, yet plans to launch with US creators in late 2026 and ultimately build more than 200 creator-led software brands by 2030. The challenge will be proving that creator trust transfers into durable product usage, not just strong launch-day acquisition.
AI may make software cheaper to build. Affinity Labs is betting the harder advantage to reproduce will be an audience that already trusts the person launching it.
