music-technology
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ROLI taught the keyboard to bend. Can it teach the rest of us to play?
The Seaboard made a piano-shaped instrument behave like something else entirely. Now ROLI is betting on light-up keys, hand tracking and an AI coach - while its business faces another financial test.
Mahtab Neptune Knows That Music Technology Must Be Heard Twice
Her career has moved from rooms and subcultures to software and signal processing. At Eventide, Mahtab Neptune’s task is to translate deep engineering into a reason for creators to listen.
Ben Vigoda Has Spent 25 Years Teaching Machines to Handle the Mess
Before AI could sell you a jacket, Ben Vigoda taught chips to reckon with uncertainty. Now the Product Genius CEO is applying the same obsession to every scroll, pause and click.
Johannes Naylor Is Building the Backstage Map Music Forgot
He left a lucrative software job, kept the unfashionable infrastructure problems, and turned a musician's touring headache into a live-music data company. His edge is less rock-star mythology than patient systems thinking, fast experiments and an unusually public operating manual.
Ralph Cavallaro Has Been Debugging the Music Business Since the Car-Wash Era
Before dashboards, agents and audit trails, Ralph Cavallaro learned systems thinking by producing a teenage punk band, washing cars to fund its record and calling college stations until they listened. Three decades later, the medium has changed; his habit of making unruly machinery usable has not.
Hassane Slaibi Tuned a Tiny Annoyance Into a Hardware Company
A flute player with absolute pitch helped build a machine for everyone who does not have it. Four generations, several crowdfunding campaigns and one delightfully stubborn hardware journey later, Hassane Slaibi is still removing friction between musicians and the moment they begin to play.
Jon Baltz Built a Music Career in the Margins of the Play Button
Before creator revenue became a conference cliché, Jon Baltz was helping independent musicians collect the money hiding inside fan uploads. His 15-year path from college booking rooms to Symphonic is a lesson in making the unglamorous machinery matter.
Roadie Built a Robot for the Most Annoying 60 Seconds in Music - Then Musicians Paid to Improve It
A 12-string oud created a tedious problem. Four generations, several crowdfunding campaigns and one stubborn hardware company later, Roadie has turned tuning pegs into a small but revealing consumer-tech business.
The Company That Made a Flop, Then Made It the Sound of Modern Music
Ikutaro Kakehashi built drum machines nobody wanted. Then a generation of broke producers dug them out of pawn shops - and rewrote pop music with them.
Positive Grid Put a Guitar Rig in an App - Then Learned the Hard Part Was Shipping the Amp
Positive Grid turned a deep guitar-software engine into a friendly living-room amp and found a mass audience. Its next test is whether the same app-first playbook can travel from the bedroom to the stage.
The Woburn Pedal Nerds Who Turned a Spare DSP Chip Into a Cult
A six-person shop of chip engineers and sound obsessives spent 20 years making effects pedals that other companies would later copy. Then Ernie Ball came knocking.
The Company That Taught a Reed Organ to Play the 1980s
A broken schoolhouse organ in 1887 became the world's largest instrument maker. How Yamaha turned tuning forks, FM chips and player pianos into a 3-billion-dollar sound empire.
Alex Mitchell Is Turning the First Chair Into an Open Seat
A competitive violinist learned to sell songs, read crowds and build products. Now the Boomy co-founder is testing a more consequential idea: what happens when making music becomes an invitation instead of an audition?
Fender’s Hardest Product Isn’t a Guitar. It’s the Second Lesson.
The company that gave rock music its favorite silhouette now has a more delicate job: keeping a beginner from putting the guitar back in the closet.
Believe Built the Missing Middle Between Uploading a Song and Building a Career
The Paris company turned digital distribution into a ladder: self-serve tools at the bottom, local expertise in the middle, and full artist development at the top. Now it is adding publishing, deeper marketing, and a responsible-AI position to the same system.
Hook
Hook is a New York-based music technology company behind an AI-powered social app that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs into short-form clips for social media. By combining a catalog of over 20 million licensed recordings with AI tools for genre-shifting, tempo changes and video editing, Hook aims to turn unauthorized fan remixing into a channel that keeps artists and rights holders in control - and paid. Founded by former JioSaavn COO Gaurav Sharma, the company launched on iOS in early 2026 and raised a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
David Schofman
David Schofman is the CEO and co-founder of Coro Health, an Austin-based company that builds therapeutic music and multi-faith spiritual streaming programs for senior living communities, hospitals and hospices. A serial entrepreneur who built one of the first online golf retail businesses in the 1990s and later ran global ecommerce for Callaway Golf, Schofman turned to health technology in 2008, translating research on music and the brain into a subscription platform now used across thousands of care communities in the US and Canada.
Medallion
Medallion is a New York-based music technology company that gives recording artists a white-label digital hub to build and monetize their own fan communities. Founded by former Songkick CEO Matt Jones and launched in 2022, the platform lets artists promote releases, tour dates and merch drops, sell digital collectibles and 'Digital Deluxe' albums, and offer exclusive access to their most devoted superfans - all under the artist's own branding rather than a third-party social feed. Backed by $22.7M in funding from investors including Dragonfly, Lightspeed Faction, The Chernin Group and Metallica's Black Squirrel Partners, Medallion powers communities for artists such as Jungle, Disclosure, Greta Van Fleet, Sigur Ros and My Morning Jacket.
Rivet
Rivet is a Boston-based, AI-powered fan engagement platform that helps musicians, creators, labels and their teams turn attention into revenue. It stitches together scattered fan signals from social, commerce, ticketing, streaming and community channels into one owned view of every fan, then automates the outreach - email, SMS, DMs and ads - that converts casual listeners into repeat buyers. Born from a musician's frustration with tracking fans in spreadsheets, Rivet gives independent artists the kind of first-party data and CRM tooling once reserved for the industry's top 1 percent.
Anj Fayemi
Anj Fayemi is a Lagos-raised, MIT-trained mechanical engineer and recording rapper (Solstice Fayemz) who turned his own frustration releasing a second album into Rivet, an AI-driven CRM that helps artists and creators find and grow their most loyal fans. As co-founder and CEO, he interviewed 200+ artists, went through Techstars Boston, raised a $500k pre-seed led by Drive Capital, and built a platform used by roughly 1,400 creators that stitches together data from Instagram, Shopify and Eventbrite to surface the fans most likely to show up and buy.
Splash
Splash is an Australian AI-music company that turns Roblox players into music makers and performers. Founded in Brisbane in 2017 by ex-Twitter alumni, it builds proprietary AI for text-to-singing, generative composition and voice transfer, then wraps that tech inside games and apps where Gen Z and Alpha fans create, remix and perform tracks live. Its flagship Roblox world, Splash: Skate & Music, has surpassed 480 million visits, and the company is led by CEO Tracy Chan, formerly of SoundCloud, Twitch, Spotify and YouTube.
Output Inc.
Output is a Los Angeles-based music technology company that builds software instruments, effects, and AI-assisted tools for musicians, producers, and sound designers. Founded in 2013 by composer Gregg Lehrman, its plugins - including the cloud-connected sampler Arcade and the AI-powered Co-Producer - have shaped records by Drake, Justin Bieber, Coldplay and Rihanna, as well as scores for Stranger Things and Game of Thrones. The company bootstrapped for seven years before raising a $45M Series A from Summit Partners in 2020.
Gregg Lehrman
Gregg Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Output, the Los Angeles music software company whose plugins and instruments turn up in records by Billie Eilish, Beyonce, Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar and scores like Stranger Things and Game of Thrones. A Cornell-trained composer who cut his teeth assisting Hans Zimmer and became Universal Publishing's youngest executive producer at 26, Lehrman built Output in 2013 because the creative tools he wanted as a working musician did not yet exist. He bootstrapped the company for seven years before raising a $45M Series A from Summit Partners in 2020, and built Arcade, one of the first cloud-based music plugins.
Suno
Suno is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building generative-AI tools that turn a text prompt into a full song - vocals, instruments, and lyrics - in seconds. Founded by four former Kensho machine-learning engineers who were also musicians, Suno has grown into one of the most-used consumer AI apps, with tens of millions of users generating millions of tracks a day. It rode a string of rapid model releases (v3 through v5) and an in-browser DAW called Suno Studio to roughly $300M in annual recurring revenue and a $5.4B valuation, all while fighting - and beginning to settle - copyright lawsuits from the major record labels.
Ariadna Bogolepova
Ariadna Bogolepova went from a curious Suno user finishing her economics degree in Russia to a UX Research Ops team member at the AI music company in Cambridge. A self-taught content creator whose Suno videos racked up millions of views, she parlayed obsessive product knowledge and a project-management background into a role studying how people actually make music with AI. She holds a Master of Science in Management Studies from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
Kakul Srivastava
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the cloud-based music creation platform powering millions of producers worldwide with sample libraries, plugins, and AI-powered tools. A mechanical engineer turned product visionary, she grew Flickr from 37,000 to 60 million users, led product at GitHub and Adobe's Creative Cloud, and co-founded the enterprise app studio Tomfoolery. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025 and Billboard's Women in Music Executives list three years running, she champions a philosophy that technology should empower artists — not replace them.