Steven Bartlett’s holding company Steven.com closed an eight-figure investment round at a $425 million valuation, positioning the media entrepreneur to expand his creator economy ventures. The funding, led by Slow Ventures and Apeiron Investment Group, represents what the company calls Europe’s largest creator holding company fundraising to date.

Slow Ventures joins Apeiron Investment Group in backing Bartlett’s vision to develop what he describes as “the Disney of the creator economy.” The investment allows Bartlett to maintain more than 90% ownership while providing capital to scale his established divisions, including FlightStory, FlightCast, and FlightFund.

“By bringing together creator IP (Intellectual Property), capital and our infrastructure, Steven.com is positioning itself to lead in the next era of the creator economy,” Bartlett said in a media release.

Megan Lightcap, Partner at Slow Ventures, described Bartlett as “a meticulously data-driven entrepreneur whose content, deep community, and portfolio of companies create a powerful flywheel that fuels system-wide growth.”

Growing Media Portfolio

Steven.com now employs more than 100 people full-time across offices in London, Manchester, Los Angeles, and New York. Through his media division, FlightStory, Bartlett works with prominent creator talent including Trevor Noah, Davina McCall, and Paul C. Brunson.

The company’s flagship property, “The Diary of a CEO” (DOAC), which Bartlett hosts, ranks among the world’s largest interview podcasts. The show reports 13 million YouTube subscribers, 70 million monthly views/downloads, and recently surpassed one billion views on YouTube alone. DOAC adds approximately 600,000 new YouTube subscribers monthly, according to company data.

Creator Economy Infrastructure

Earlier this month, Bartlett launched FlightCast.com, described as “the world’s first podcast hosting platform built for video, with built-in AI and testing capabilities.” This platform represents part of Bartlett’s strategy to develop tools that use creator audience data to optimize growth for creator intellectual property.

Christian Angermayer of Apeiron Investment Group pointed to the structural shift occurring in media: “Influence is flowing to individuals at unprecedented speed and scale. When the architecture of attention changes, it rewrites the rules for how capital moves, how culture forms, and how value is created.”

Bartlett, who also appears as an investor on BBC’s “Dragons’ Den” (the UK equivalent of Shark Tank), maintains a diverse investor base in Steven.com that now includes Slow Ventures, Philipp Freise (KKR), Second Sight Ventures, Tom Profumo (Active Partners), Magnus Grimeland (Antler), Gary Vaynerchuk, Kevin Rose, Will Ahmed (Founder of Whoop), Bryan Johnson, and Alex Hormozi.