Last week we closed our Pre-Seed round: £480K from Fuel Ventures. It's a meaningful milestone, and I want to say something honest about what it means and what it doesn't.
It doesn't mean we've figured everything out. It means we have enough runway to figure out the right things.
Why Fuel Ventures
Fuel Ventures backs UK tech companies at the earliest stage — the pre-revenue, pre-product-market-fit stage where most institutional capital won't go. Their cheque range sits between £150K and £3M, which puts them squarely in the gap between friends-and-family rounds and the Series A world.
We spoke with five other funds. Two passed immediately because we were too early. One wanted us to pivot toward enterprise HR. Fuel didn't ask us to change the product direction. They asked us to prove the creator problem was real — which we did with 14 recorded user interviews and a six-week beta with 47 creators who showed up voluntarily and stayed active.
That last part mattered more than any pitch deck. Retention in a beta cohort — especially unpaid retention — is the most honest signal you can show an early-stage investor. Fuel understood that.
What the problem actually is
The creator economy gets described as a $250 billion industry, but that number obscures what's happening for individual creators. For the majority — people making consistent content on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, or their own newsletters — the actual challenge isn't creativity. It's coordination.
A typical solo creator runs ideas in Apple Notes, drafts in Google Docs, tracks deadlines in Notion or Trello, posts through Buffer or Later, and checks analytics across three separate platform dashboards. They spend roughly 40% of their weekly time on workflow, not output. We confirmed this in our beta: the average creator in our cohort was using 6.2 tools before they tried Deaku.
Six tools. For a solo operation. Most of them weren't built for creators — they were adapted from tools built for marketing teams or knowledge workers. The gap was obvious once we started looking at it seriously.
What we built and what beta users actually said
Our beta ran from November 2024 to February 2025. The 47 participants ranged from a finance YouTuber with 45K subscribers to a technical writer building a paid newsletter. We gave them access to three core modules: the Idea Inbox, the AI Briefing Engine, and the Multi-Channel Scheduler.
Two things surprised us. First, the briefing engine saw 3x more daily use than we expected. Users weren't using it to write for them — they were using it as a thinking partner. They'd type in a vague idea, read the generated brief, then throw half of it away and keep the structure. That told us the value wasn't AI output; it was AI scaffolding.
Second, the scheduler's calendar view became the default landing page for most users after week two. Even users who said they wouldn't use scheduling features were checking the calendar daily. The act of seeing all upcoming content in one view changed how they planned. It became their command centre rather than just a posting queue.
What the money is for
The £480K will cover three things: hiring, infrastructure, and research.
Hiring: we're bringing on a senior product engineer who worked previously on Notion's editor team, and a growth engineer who built attribution tooling at a creator monetisation startup. Both are London-based. Both are joining for below-market salary with meaningful equity, which tells you something about their conviction in what we're building.
Infrastructure: our edge inference layer needs a redesign before we scale. Right now our average brief generation takes 50ms on a warm model — that's fast enough for beta but not fast enough for the production load we expect at launch. We're moving to a distributed edge setup that should bring that down to under 20ms at the 95th percentile.
Research: we have six months of beta data that we've barely analysed properly. We're hiring a part-time data analyst to run proper cohort analysis — looking at which creator types retain best, which features they use first, and where the drop-off happens between idea capture and published content. That analysis will drive our next product sprint.
The public beta timeline
We're targeting a public beta launch in Q3 2025. The waitlist is open now at deaku.org. Early access includes the Growth plan free for 60 days, which covers all three core modules plus analytics. No credit card required at sign-up.
We'll email the waitlist before we open more broadly. If you're a creator who's been following along, getting on the list now is the fastest path to access.
What I'm thinking about personally
I started Deaku because I was spending more time managing my content workflow than actually making content. I had 200K monthly readers across two newsletters and a YouTube channel. I was also using seven different tools and maintaining three separate content calendars in three different apps. It was embarrassing, honestly. I'd built a business around helping other creators be more productive while running my own operation like a mess.
Deaku started as a tool I built for myself. The fact that 47 strangers found it useful enough to use every day is the only validation I needed. The funding is the mechanism that lets us make it good enough for everyone.
If you have questions about the product or the round, my email is oscar@deaku.org. I read everything.