Photo credits: Sara Larsson and Stephen Gyasi
Less than a year after Freshsound secured $1.33 million from investors, “self-service music licensing platform” Freshsound has announced a €2 million ($2.18 million at current exchange rate) capital increase and set itself the goal of driving global expansion.
News of this latest round from Stockholm-based company Freshsound, which says it makes commercially released music available to “professional storytellers” in exchange for “completely transparent” royalties, broke today in several Scandinavian tech publications.
Unlike competing platforms like Epidemic Sound (which is also based in Stockholm), Freshsound “charges no subscription fees,” according to its website, while the license costs above automatically adjust based on the nature of the project and the usage at hand. And after siphoning off $1.33 million in investor capital last summer, the syncing startup hired former Sony Music and Warner Music exec Helen McLaughlin to lead the catalog.
Stockholm-based Zenith Venture Capital and Aligned Ventures are said to have led Freshsound’s latest round of funding, albeit with the former’s involvement grandfather Managing Director Erik Segerborg, Hipgnosis Vet Shiv Prakash, Freshsound Board Member Kristina Tunkrans, Royal streaming Director Gustav Nordlindh and film director William Olsson.
In a statement, Freshsound co-founder and CEO Stevie Gyasi said the newly raised capital will help his company “build its pool of professional storytellers in advertising and production.” In addition, the co-founder of Värmeverket and board member of AP Academy addressed the startup’s broader goal of “transforming the rights process for commercial music”.
“This investment round will help Freshsound grow its pool of professional storytellers in advertising and production, increasing the potential for music creators to make money and for content creators to create even more impactful content,” Gyasi said. “We look forward to continuing our journey to the next phase and attracting more users to our cause.”
In other industry funding news, events management platform POSH ($5 million), indie distributor Magroove ($1.6 million), KI -assisted musician collaboration startup Myxt ($2 million) and smart TV music video app ROXi ($8.7 million) and earlier this week AI music separator AudioShake ($2.7 million Dollar). Supporters of the latter include Metallica’s Black Squirrel, AJR, Crush Music and Peermusic.
Meanwhile, the track also delivered nearly $11 million in funding for AI sheet music digitization service Enote (which is an investor in the EU’s European Innovation Council), as well as announcing a $32 million raise by the indie specialist IP acquisition firm Duetti (which Roc Nation, Presight Capital and others have backed).