Estonian billing and monetisation platform for AI-native companies, Creem, has raised a €5 million seed round led by Polish fund Inovo VC to fast-track its growth.
Existing investors Practica Capital and Antler participated in the round alongside founders-angel investors including Markus Villig (Bolt), Timmu Tõke and Kaspar Tiri (Ready Player Me), Fryd Wiatrowski (Viktor.com) and Adam Jafer (Voi). The round brings Creem’s total funding to €7 million.
Creem says it ‘lets startups sell globally without worrying about tax and compliance, and manages the affiliates, analytics and revenue infrastructure that come with growing a business’. And apparently, all that can be set up from a single prompt.
The company has had a stellar year, reporting that it more than doubled revenue to over €2M ARR, and has now launched Creem 2.0, where an AI agent can set up a startup's entire billing system from a single prompt, apparently.
Founded in Tallinn in 2024 by Gabriel Ferraz and Alec Erasmus it also recently completed its first acquisition. It bought fellow Estonian payments startup Askel.ai last month, a deal that came purely by happenstance.
In conversation with Fomo.Observer, Cream’s CEO Ferraz told the story of how he met Joosep Kõljalg, co-founder of Askel.ai. He met Kõljalg at a dinner without knowing who he was. Their chats got deep into payments technology, and later, when Ferraz looked him up, he saw Kõljalg’s history with companies like Skype, Twilio and Checkout.com; it piqued his interest more.
The real happenstance came the following evening, while at another rather fancy dinner (with the Prime Minister, if you don’t mind), Ferraz declared he simply must have a Head of Payments (namely Joosep) and this time it turned out his table companion happened to be an investor in Askel … and well, you already know how that turned out!
Meeting Ferraz
Another big move made this summer, by Creem, was a relocation to a lovely new office in Rotermanni. We popped along recently to check the place out and get to know more about Ferraz.
His educational background reads a little like a future Netflix documentary. He had his first job at twelve years of age where he worked the only card machine at a flea market for all the sellers - running between stalls, taking payments on the machine and doing their bookkeeping for them. It’s no surprise to find out where he’s ended up, simplifying payments.
He didn’t finish high school because at the age of fifteen he went to university to study computer science at UFU (Federal University of Uberlândia) and then earned himself the coveted title of university dropout, although technically he says he never quit, he just hasn’t gone back.
During a backpacking trip he came to Estonia to visit a friend who was working in Change Invest at the time. He visited him in the office one day and was so impressed by the set up he decided to get a job there. He moved himself to Tallinn in 2019 and six months later he met his wife. Oh, and one of the main factors for the move was the weather, he’s pretty fond of the cold.
"I actually love the winter. I love the cold weather. I struggle in the summer," he says.
Building in public
Building Creem was done through social media channels, a decision which served the company well. "We started bootstrapping the company with YouTube — basically me doing vlogs on YouTube. 'Hey, we are building the company like this, this was the challenge that we had today.' And also on Twitter, literally seeing people complaining about competitors and sending an ice cream emoji on the reply of their tweet. That's how we bootstrapped the company," Ferraz explains.
Creem 2.0
On September 17, 2024 Creem was launched and it gained its first customer on day one. Exactly two years later Creem 2.0 was launched, today.
This version is ‘going beyond a standard merchant of record. Handling global sales with tax and compliance built in, affiliate management, revenue splits, conversion analytics, short links and marketing channel tracking and abandoned cart recovery.'
Creem says it ‘also supports the pricing models modern software actually uses, including usage-based pricing, credit wallets, seat-based plans and prepaid credits.’
Looking to the future
Ferraz tells me that he already knows the platform that they need to build for the future but it requires a ‘conscious step’ because the ‘markets and behaviours’ that they are betting on are yet to exist.
“We believe that in five to ten years, we're going to be looking at a very different way of working, where we're going to see much smaller teams, much more fluid teams,” he says.
“People are not going to work in only one product or only with one team. A lot of people are going to be in a much more fluid state between different products and different teams, and they are going to be able to translate these incentives or coordinate these incentives in a much more aligned way, and what I mean by that is that you are going to be able to receive your salary, your compensation, etc. based on specific results that are programmatic as well.”
With the latest funding the team will focus on extending the platform with agent-run billing and monetisation, so stores can be set up, monitored and optimised with minimal human input. Also growth and revenue tooling, including affiliates, analytics and marketing channel tracking, and global compliance and payouts across fiat and stablecoin rails.
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