Technology

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 Ventures’ Fund I. Soon after Unilever acquired Wild, another Creator Ventures-backed company, Runna, exited to running 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 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 ten 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.”

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Technology

Twenty years strong: a love letter to TechCrunch

TechCrunch is turning 20. I’ve been here half that time. I worked previously at numerous major media properties, including Time Inc, Dow Jones, and Reuters; this has been the best job of my life, which is maybe why the time has gone so fast.

There’s nothing like the culture here. Contrarian, smart, hilarious, and hard-working. Almost everyone at TC wears multiple hats, as anyone who has worked here will tell you. This isn’t just another media company — it’s a place where people are curious about everything, everyone cares a crazy amount about the brand (and each other), and where challenging conventional wisdom isn’t just encouraged but expected.

Over the past decade, I’ve personally had the opportunity to interview some amazing people: Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Lina Khan, Conan O’Brien, Al Gore, Finland’s Sanna Marin, along with people making defense tech, building consumer giants, and selling their software companies for billions of dollars. My colleagues have collectively talked with thousands more whose impact on our lives is felt daily. From these conversations, we’ve learned — then explained to our readers — how technology, policy, and human ambition intersect to shape the world.

We’ve done this from our homes, from coffee shops, from offices, but also across the world, to the many places TechCrunch has taken us, from Lisbon, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and Davos to (nearly) the opposite end of the globe: Lagos, Nairobi, Hong Kong, and Hangzhou.

Across these cities, we’ve sat down with founders who became superstars and superstars who became prison inmates. We’ve watched boring technologies take over the world and celebrated technologies that devolved into dumpster fires.

We’ve seen entire industries born, mature, and sometimes wither. We’ve watched two-person startups become trillion-dollar companies and told you about business innovations that flipped industries upside down — from subscription models to the gig economy to, more recently, AI roll-ups. We’ve reported on breakthroughs that changed everything. We’ve also covered “breakthroughs” that amounted to bupkis.

And we’re still here. In recent weeks alone, TC has sat down with the prime minister of Greece and the mayor of San Francisco; we’ve also covered big stories involving the most prominent VCs, startup founders, and big tech outfits in the industry. I’d stack our transportation, startup, cybersecurity, and AI coverage against anyone’s.

These are tough times in media; it’s among the growing number of industries in flux. But to everyone who’s gleefully written about the supposed demise of TC, plot twist — we’re still here! Twenty years in, we’re still breaking the stories that matter, still holding power accountable, still finding the next big thing before it’s obvious to everyone else. We’re doing it for a growing audience, too.

Michael Arrington, thank you for creating this brand that became so much more than any of us could have imagined. Thanks to every parent company that’s supported us and helped us keep doing what we love, including, today, Regent. TC’s ownership has changed over the years, but our mission to find the signal in the noise and tell stories that matter remains the same.

Here’s to the perspective that twenty years gives you, and to twenty more years of asking hard questions, helping readers see around corners, and working with people who make even the roughest days worth it.

To everyone who’s been part of this story — writers, editors, sources, readers, attendees, speakers, critics, and cheerleaders — thank you for making TechCrunch what it is, a place for people who want to understand what’s coming next, who firmly believe that tech can make the world better — and who trust us to call out when it doesn’t. We appreciate you. Cheers!

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Technology

Meta AI gains video editing capabilities

Meta said Wednesday that it is adding video editing capabilities to Meta AI that let users edit short videos using preset AI prompts to change costumes, locations, and styles. With these new features, the company is taking on rivals like Google that have been steadily adding generative AI video tools to their apps, as well as other AI-powered editing platforms like Captions.

The company is rolling out the editing tools to the Meta AI app, Meta.ai website, and its Capcut competitor, Edits, in the U.S. It says that the features were inspired by its Movie Gen AI models, but it’s not clear if the company is using those models to power the editing tools.

For now, users will have to deal with 50 presets to edit a 10-second video. Meta said that it gathered feedback from creators to make these presets so that they can be easily included in the Edits app.

ezgif 27dbf937d8be70 — Image Credits: Meta AI

The presets can apply a “vintage comic book style” to a video, change the lighting in a clip to a rainy day, or swap out a subject’s clothing to a space cadet suit, to give a few examples. You can share edited videos directly to Facebook and Instagram from the Edits and Meta AI app.

Meta said it plans to add more customization options later this year.

“We built this […] so that everyone can experiment creatively and make fun, interesting videos to share with their friends, family, and followers,” the company said in a blog post. “Whether you’re reimagining a favorite family memory or finding new ways to entertain your audience, our video editing [tools] can help.”

Meta AI already has image generation features across platforms. It seems with this video editing feature, Meta wants more creators to use its own tools rather than third-party apps.

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Technology

Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z bio and health strategy, steps down

Vijay Pande, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who founded the firm’s a16z Bio + Health strategy, announced that he is stepping down from his role.

Since its founding in 2014, a16z Bio + Health has raised four funds of nearly $3 billion each, including a $1.5 billion fund that closed in 2022. However, it’s now seeking a much smaller $750 million fifth fund, The Wall Street Journal reported. In January, a16z Bio + Health announced that it will manage a $500 million biotech fund funded by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.

a16z Bio + Health backs digital health startups and companies at the intersection of AI, computation, and biology.

Pande’s investments include Devoted Health, an individualized medical plan provider; Function Health, a personalized lab testing startup; and Freenome, a company aiming to detect cancer through blood draws. Before joining Andreessen Horowitz, Pande was a professor of chemistry, structural biology, and computer science at Stanford University.

The remaining partners on the a16z Bio + Health team are Jorge Conde, Julie Yoo, and Vineeta Agarwala.