Estonia's Creem Lands €5M To Build A Financial OS For AI-Native Founders

Creem, a Tallinn based fintech company, has raised 5 million euros in seed funding to build what its founders describe as a financial operating system for small, globally distributed software companies whose teams increasingly include AI agents alongside human staff.

The round was led by Polish venture capital fund Inovo VC, with existing investors Practica Capital and Antler also participating. A group of angel investors joined as well, including Bolt founder Markus Villig, Ready Player Me co‑founders Timmu Tõke and Kaspar Tiri, Voi's Adam Jafer, and Viktor.com founder Fryd Wiatrowski. The round brings Creem's total funding to 7 million euros, following an earlier 1.8 million euro pre‑seed round in 2025 that several of the same investors also backed.

Creem was founded in 2024 by chief executive Gabriel Ferraz and co‑founder Alec Erasmus, both with backgrounds at Google and Adyen. Ferraz's own path into payments began well before either of those roles, having taken his first payment at age 12 working a market stall in Brazil, before leaving university at 16 to build one of the country's first development agencies focused on crypto and later scaling a payments platform to more than 180 million euros in volume ahead of relocating to the Baltics in 2019. That background feeds directly into Creem's pitch, which centres on a specific gap the founders say has opened up as AI coding tools make it dramatically faster to build software, while the financial infrastructure needed to actually monetise that software has not kept pace.

According to Creem, founders today typically have to stitch together separate services for checkout, tax compliance, payouts, billing, affiliate management and analytics just to start generating revenue internationally, a fragmented setup that adds real operational overhead precisely at the moment a lean, AI‑augmented team is trying to avoid hiring a traditional finance function. Creem's platform consolidates those functions into a single system, handling billing, payments, tax compliance, payouts and revenue management together, with support for both fiat and stablecoin payment rails.

A distinguishing feature of Creem's approach is how directly it is designed to be operated by AI agents rather than only by human founders. Rather than building its own agentic checkout or payments agent to compete in an increasingly crowded field of similar efforts, Creem has opted to make its existing infrastructure usable by whatever agents a founder already relies on. Ferraz has described that choice explicitly, noting that while many startups are racing to build their own agent workflows or agentic payments systems, Creem instead lets founders bring whichever agents they already use and put those agents to work running and optimising their own store, letting revenue grow without a corresponding need to grow headcount. In practice, that means an agent can set up a store's billing directly from a prompt, and continue monitoring and optimising that store's monetisation afterward, without a human founder manually configuring or adjusting billing logic themselves.

Creem's growth over the roughly ten months since its pre‑seed round gives some indication of how quickly demand for that kind of infrastructure has grown. The company's annual recurring revenue has more than doubled to over 2 million euros, achieved without a dedicated sales team, while headcount has expanded from a single founder to a team of fifteen. Arvydas Bloze, a partner at existing investor Practica Capital, has framed Creem's broader appeal around control, arguing that as AI tooling increasingly automates large parts of a founder's operations, Creem's approach gives that control back to the founder rather than locking them into a single opinionated agent or workflow.

The new funding will go toward scaling what the company calls Creem 2.0 and broadening its platform beyond core financial infrastructure into more of the growth and revenue tools small, internationally focused software companies rely on, including affiliate management, analytics and marketing channel tracking. Over the next 12 to 18 months, Creem plans to develop its agent‑operated billing and monetisation capabilities further, expand its compliance and payout coverage across new markets, and continue building out programmable APIs aimed specifically at the kind of complex, multi‑party revenue arrangements common among small, distributed teams working with contributors and partners across several countries at once.

Creem's raise fits into a broader wave of fintech infrastructure companies positioning themselves specifically around the needs of AI‑native businesses, a category that has expanded quickly as generative AI tools lower the barrier to building software products but leave the surrounding operational and financial infrastructure largely unchanged. Whether Creem's decision to serve existing AI agents rather than build a proprietary one of its own proves the more durable strategy, as opposed to the increasingly common approach of pairing a dedicated in‑house agent directly with a payments stack, will likely become clearer as more AI‑native founders settle on which agents they actually want running their businesses day to day.