music-tech
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EuraCreative’s big idea: put the creative industries within walking distance
At Plaine Images, a former textile district in northern France, game makers, music startups and researchers share a postcode. EuraCreative’s job is to turn that proximity into companies, customers and paid work.
The Idea Village wants your startup to grow - and stay
A New Orleans nonprofit has built a route from a first business idea to venture capital. Its most revealing feature is the price of admission: no fee or equity for its flagship accelerator, with investment handled separately.
Peter Sinclair’s quiet revolution: give artists the check, then get out of the way
Peter Sinclair never pretended to have the golden ear. His sharper idea was that musicians deserved capital without a stranger rearranging their careers - a principle that became beatBread and outlived its founder.
Morgan Hayduk Found the Music Business Had a Fraud Problem Hiding in Plain Hearing
He set out to reconcile royalty statements. The trail led to bots, click farms and stolen accounts - and a company built to make every legitimate play count.
Tapped AI Tried to Be an AI Record Label. The Better Business Was Hiding in the Venue Spreadsheet
The New York startup began with a $50-a-month AI artist-services pitch, hit the cold-start wall of a two-sided marketplace, and rebuilt around a less glamorous asset: useful live-music data. Its most copyable idea is also its least theatrical - let one customer group improve the dataset for the next.
The Synth That Took Nine Years to Ship
Tangible Instruments raised $94,713 on Kickstarter in 2015 to build a pocket melody machine. It shipped to backers in November 2024. Here is what took so long, and why people still wanted it.
Beatdapp Went Looking for Missing Royalties - and Found a Fraud Economy Hiding in the Stream
The founders thought music services had an accounting problem. The data pointed to something stranger: bots, click farms and stolen accounts competing with real listeners for a finite royalty pool. Beatdapp built the referee - then widened the field.
Yoav Zimmerman
Yoav Zimmerman is a San Francisco founder and machine learning engineer who is CEO and co-founder of Third Chair (YC X25), an AI-native IP enforcement agent that helps rightsholders find, stop, and monetize unauthorized use of their content. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he previously co-founded the social video analytics startup Trendpop (YC W21), grew it past $1M ARR with clients like Universal Music Group and MrBeast, and exited to Collab. Before startups he worked on machine learning at Google and at Determined AI.
Mixy
Mixy is a mobile app that lets anyone make music mashups in seconds - blending the vocals of one song with the beat of another, no DJ skills required. Powered by the founders' own on-device AI models, it produces real-time mixes for free and auto-credits the source artists on every share. Founded in 2025 by Joe Kennedy and Jonah Siegle and backed by Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, Mixy grew to 1.5M users and 18M mashups within three months of launch, hitting #1 in Music and #3 overall on the App Store.
Gaurav Sharma
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Hook, a New York-based AI music platform that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs and share them to social feeds while artists and rights holders keep control and get paid. A Johns Hopkins and Peabody Conservatory-trained musician turned operator, he previously helped scale India's JioSaavn to hundreds of millions of listeners and built and sold two consumer-tech startups. In 2026 Hook closed a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $16 million.
Boomy
Boomy is a Berkeley-based generative-music company whose web app lets anyone create original songs with AI in about 30 seconds - pick a style, hit generate, tweak the result, and optionally release it to Spotify, Apple Music and 40+ platforms while collecting royalties. Founded in 2018 by Alex Mitchell and Matthew Cohen Santorelli, Boomy says its users have created more than 20 million tracks, making it one of the most-used AI music tools and a lightning rod in the debate over what AI-made music means for streaming.
Matt Jones
Matt Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Medallion, a New York-based platform that lets artists build branded, artist-owned digital environments where their most engaged fans can pay for early access, exclusive drops, and premium music formats. Before Medallion he ran Crowdsurge, the direct-to-fan ticketing company he started in 2008 that later merged with Songkick; he served as Songkick's CEO through its 2017 acquisition by Warner Music Group. Medallion closed a $13.7M Series A in December 2023 led by Dragonfly and Lightspeed Faction, with Metallica's Black Squirrel Partners, Coinbase Ventures, and members of Disclosure, Jungle, and Mt. Joy also on the cap table.
indify
indify is a New York music marketplace that connects emerging independent artists with the partners they need to build a career - funders, managers, marketers, lawyers and creatives - without a traditional record deal. Founded in 2015 by three childhood friends, it started as a data tool for spotting breakout talent early (it flagged Billie Eilish, Post Malone and Khalid before they were famous) and evolved into a platform where artists strike transparent, per-release deals, keep their masters, retain creative control, and keep at least 50% of profits after an investor is repaid.
Shav Garg
Shav Garg is the co-founder and CEO of indify, a New York music-tech company that uses a predictive algorithm to spot emerging artists before they break and connect them with investors, managers and partners on artist-friendly terms. Founded in 2015 in the basement of his family home with two childhood friends from Scarsdale, indify flagged Khalid, Billie Eilish and Post Malone early and has reshaped how independent musicians fund careers while keeping their masters. Garg is also a working singer-songwriter who records as prettyboyshav.
Mark Spier
Mark Spier is the founder and CEO of Royalty Solutions Corp, a New York royalty-accounting and copyright-administration firm whose tagline is 'you make the Music, we do the Math.' A Cornell-trained computer scientist with a Columbia MBA, he spent early years at IBM and as a VP at Credit Suisse before taking over Memory Lane Music Group in 2003, the family publishing house his grandfather started in 1923. In 2009 he founded Royalty Solutions to bring transparency and software to the messy business of paying songwriters, building proprietary systems like the TuneLicensing mechanical-licensing engine and a client royalty portal.
Garrett Dodge
Garrett Dodge is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rockbot, the business media platform that powers music, TV, digital signage, and advertising for nearly 50,000 brick-and-mortar locations across North America. Founded in 2010, Rockbot has grown into a $9.2M revenue company serving major brands including Planet Fitness, Walmart, Shake Shack, and JetBlue, backed by Google Ventures, Universal Music Group, and others. Dodge holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an MBA from MIT Sloan, and previously helped build Caesars Entertainment's Innovation Team before channeling that experience into reimagining how physical spaces use media to engage customers.
Splice
Splice is a cloud-based music creation platform that turned the sample pack into a streaming service. Its subscription gives producers royalty-free access to millions of human-made loops, one-shots, presets, and MIDI files, plus rent-to-own pricing on premium plugins and an expanding suite of AI tools (Create Mode, Variations, Magic Fit) that compensate the original sample creators each time their sound feeds a new track.
Tracy Chan
Tracy Chan is the CEO of Splash, the AI music platform that turned Roblox into the world's biggest music game with 480 million players. A veteran music-tech executive who built creator tools at YouTube, founded and sold CrowdAlbum to Spotify, scaled Spotify for Artists, led music at Twitch during the pandemic, and ran content at SoundCloud before joining Splash in March 2024 - Chan has spent his career at the exact intersection where technology meets the moment an artist connects with a fan. At Splash, he is building the infrastructure for a generation that doesn't just listen to music, it creates it.
Shamal Ranasinghe
Shamal Ranasinghe is the Chief Business Officer at Audius, the decentralized blockchain-based music streaming platform. A 25-year music-tech veteran, he co-founded Topspin Media in 2007 - one of the first direct-to-fan platforms for musicians - before spending eight years as VP of Product at Pandora/SiriusXM building creator tools. At Audius, he leads major label and publishing deals, including a landmark global licensing agreement with Kobalt Music in 2024, while championing a world where artists own their music, keep 90% of revenue, and connect directly with fans without gatekeepers.
Dalton Caldwell
Dalton Caldwell is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist best known for co-founding imeem (one of the first legal music social networks), launching App.net as a principled alternative to ad-supported social media, and spending over a decade as a Managing Partner at Y Combinator advising 1,000+ startups. He is now co-founding Standard Capital, a $425M AI-native Series A fund with Paul Buchheit and Bryan Berg.