Metallica, co-founder of AudioShake supporter Black Squirrel Partners performs live. Credit: Kreepin Deth
With continued significant interest — and capital — reaching the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, AI music separation startup AudioShake has raised $2.7 million from Metallica-founded Black Squirrel Partners, Peermusic, AJR, and others collected.
San Francisco-based AudioShake unveiled its latest multimillion-dollar round (and touted the strides it’s made since its inception three years ago) in an email to Digital Music News. Touted as the “award-winning strain separation tool,” the AI-powered offering was created by CISAC and Google veterinarian Jessica Powell (who also serves as CEO) and Tunebend co-founder Luke Miner (who serves as CTO).
According to AudioShake’s CEO, Indicator Ventures led this latest round, which is said to have brought the AI company’s total capital to $5 million. Precursor Ventures (which AudioShake backed in October 2021) and Splinterlands investor Side Door Ventures were also involved, according to the AI deal, as were Alphabet/Google’s Black Angel Group, Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg, S-Curve Records boss Steve Greenberg and Crush Music.
AudioShake announced plans to invest the available $2.7 million to expand its R&D teams while optimizing the training of its AI models. Additionally, managers took the opportunity to point out that their company’s list of customers includes “divisions from all three major brand groups” as well as Reservoir, Primary Wave, Hipgnosis, Concord and Downtown.
Commenting on the raise, Jessica Powell said, “We’ve been thrilled with the adoption of our technology in the entertainment and tech industries and are excited to see third-party implementations of our music and language separation technologies now on the rise with our APIs.”
And in his own remarks, Steve Greenberg, CEO of S-Curve Records (who runs the aforementioned AJR), said in part, “I find AudioShake’s stem separation technology to be downright magical.” The performances by individual musicians on tracks from the period listening to it in isolation before multitrack recording is a real revelation. I look forward to contemporary recording artists creatively incorporating such performances into new works, with the approval of the original musicians and rights holders, of course.”
AudioShake’s $2.7 million round comes about a week after Sound Ventures announced a $240 million AI fund and investments in ChatGPT developers OpenAI, Anthropic, and StabilityAI.
Meanwhile, the first four months of 2023 not only delivered a significant number of songs created with artificial intelligence, but also saw funding rounds for AI music companies, including Myxt ($2 million) and Unhurd (a seven-figure sum). , but not the exact sum). was publicly announced) and Rivet ($500,000 in pre-foundation capital).