Oliver Yonchev, former business partner of Steven Bartlett, Flight Group-co-founder and erstwhile Social Chain director, today launches his new venture cocreatd, a new venture studio designed to “back big ideas in the marketing industry and bring them to life.”
The new company is Yonchev’s first venture since exiting Flight Group, alongside co-founders James Lawson Baker, Paul Stevens, and Simon Whitaker.
cocreatd invents, incubates, and invests in new marketing solutions, offering capital, support, and a unique growth platform to founders at the earliest stages of their journey, while co-creating alongside them and is aimed at “marketers, creatives, and technologists who want to reimagine how marketing and creative services are delivered.”
Yonchev said: “the industry needs a radically different approach – from how AI is leveraged to deliver services, how talent is rewarded through ownership, and even how organisations are being designed.”
Yonchev noted that the marketing industry has long promised access to the best creative minds, yet the last decade has seen a mass exodus of talent, accelerated by the appeal of independence, and the rise of AI. He added: “Small, agile teams of domain experts now have the power to rival large scale organisations in terms of value they can create – cocreatd is built for those people.”
Lawson Baker added the venture studio has already “made two investments in the past six weeks, and plans to incubate and invest in 8-10 more ventures by the end of 2025” – demonstrating a commitment to discovering and developing the next wave of marketing innovation.
Fellow co-founder Steven’s said that, at the core of cocreatd’s model is the belief in co-creation with founders: “This isn’t just about technology, it’s about people,” he said. “Too many talented people with great ideas, don’t pursue them, because they’re trapped by a stable salary, don’t know where to start, or simply lack the confidence to go independent.”
Whitiker added: “despite the advertising and creative industries being one of the largest UK exports, there’s a real lack of startup funding in our space, and where support is provided it’s built in the image of old adland.”
Yonchev concluded: “I’ve built and scaled multiple global agencies over the past decade and there’s never been a better time to disrupt the incumbent agencies, teams and models.”
“We can create new technology solutions faster than ever before, validate the demand for ideas before investing in them, and now with AI enablement individuals and smaller teams are now capable of out-competing much larger organisations, and this excites us.”
