Creem, an Estonian fintech startup, co founded by South African entrepreneur Alec Erasmus, has raised €1.8 million in pre seed funding to build a programmable financial operating system for the next generation of AI native companies.
The round was led by Practica Capital, with backing from Antler and a group of angel investors including Johan Pietilä, Martin Olofsson, and advisors to Revolut and Crypto.com.
Founded just 10 months ago by Erasmus and Gabriel Ferraz (a Brazil born founder), the company is already generating over €930,000 in annualized revenue — without a sales team and operated solely by the two founders. Creem’s product is targeted at lean, globally distributed startups built around AI native workflows, offering them programmable tools to manage global payments, revenue automation, tax, and compliance.
“AI is blowing open the doors of entrepreneurship, but the financial infrastructure hasn’t caught up,” said Ferraz, Creem’s CEO. “These are small teams of global contributors who need programmable, scalable financial tools, not enterprise systems built for another era.”
Replacing the Traditional Finance Department
Creem’s platform functions as a financial operating system, designed to integrate directly into product workflows and developer stacks. It supports both fiat and stablecoin payments, and features such as Revenue Splits allow companies to automatically distribute income across contributors, sales channels, or products.
The platform is already gaining traction with startups in emerging markets, solving operational bottlenecks caused by manual reconciliation and outdated financial tooling.
“Creem is building the orchestration layer for a new category of companies,” said Arvydas Bložė, Partner at Practica Capital. “They are serving a future where small teams of builders work alongside agentic workflows and distributed contributors from day one.”
South African Expertise in Global Fintech
Co founder Alec Erasmus, originally from South Africa, previously led KYC infrastructure at Adyen and built backend systems for crypto brokerages. His co founder Ferraz had earlier scaled a crypto payments platform in Brazil to over €180 million in GMV before relocating to the Baltics.
The company envisions a wave of what it calls programmable organisations — startups embedded with automated compliance, finance, and contributor workflows from their inception.
With the new capital, Creem plans to expand into additional markets, deepen its compliance stack, and develop programmable APIs for revenue automation, tax, KYC, and embedded finance.
“As company formation becomes more decentralized and global, Creem is creating the infrastructure to support the next generation of digital entrepreneurs,” said Tobias Bengtsdahl, Partner at Antler.