Creem raises €5M to build billing infrastructure for AI-native companies

Creem (Tallinn) has raised €5 million in a Seed round led by Inovo VC, with existing investors Practica Capital and Antler following on. The round also brought in angels including Bolt founder Markus Villig, Ready Player Me founders Timmu Tõke and Kaspar Tiri, Voi's Adam Jafer, and Viktor.com's Fryd Wiatrowski. The investment brings total funding to €7 million, following a €1.8 million pre-seed in August 2025. Creem reports €2 million in ARR, having doubled revenue in the period since the pre-seed. Founders Gabriel Ferraz (ex-Google) and Alec Erasmus (ex-Adyen) are building billing and monetisation infrastructure for AI-native software companies.

The premise is specific: the billing stack that serves traditional SaaS businesses — monthly subscriptions, seat-based pricing, annual contracts — was not designed for software that charges per token, per API call, per agent task, or through micropayment models that vary by usage in ways that are difficult to predict in advance.

What AI-native billing actually requires

A conventional SaaS startup charges a flat monthly fee per seat, collects payment via Stripe's standard checkout, and accounts for revenue against a straightforward MRR figure. The billing problem is simple. An AI-native company's billing is different in kind: per-call pricing, prepaid credit models, multi-tenant agent deployments where the customer's end users trigger charges, usage caps that cascade at different rates, and tax treatment that varies by jurisdiction based on whether the service is classified as software, AI processing, or a data product. International payout management — paying contributors or sub-agents in multiple currencies — adds further complexity.

Creem's platform combines the components that a founder of this kind of company would otherwise assemble from different vendors: payments, tax compliance (including VAT and sales tax collection across jurisdictions), revenue management, and payouts. The angel investor list — Markus Villig (Bolt), Timmu Tõke and Kaspar Tiri (Ready Player Me) — signals that founders of globally distributed digital product companies found the product credible enough to back personally.

Baltic traction and the infrastructure question

The Baltic startup ecosystem has produced a concentrated set of companies with international distribution ambitions: Wise, Bolt, and Pipedrive among the most visible. Creem is building in the same tradition — a financial infrastructure product designed for global use, founded in Estonia, backed by Inovo VC (Warsaw-based, with a Baltic and CEE focus) and Practica Capital (Lithuanian).

Inovo VC's lead is consistent with the fund's thesis of backing infrastructure companies for the digital economy across the CEE region. Antler's continued participation follows its pre-seed involvement.

The competitive landscape is well-populated. Stripe has moved into usage-based billing. Orb, Lago, and Amberflo compete specifically on metered billing infrastructure. Creem's differentiation is the combination of billing, compliance, and payouts in a single product, and its focus on the AI-native customer specifically — a segment that is growing fast but not yet served by any of the existing platforms as a first-class customer. Whether that segment is large enough and loyal enough to sustain a standalone infrastructure company is the question the Seed round is buying runway to answer.