Photo Credit: Markus Winkler
AI-powered rights management startup MusicInfra has announced a $5 million raise, an executive hire, and new expansion plans.
New York City-headquartered MusicInfra, which was founded in 2023 and bills itself as “a neutral, rights-data focused clearinghouse,” confirmed all three developments to DMN. Also maintaining teams in Europe and Latin America, the company told us that Luxembourg-based MiddleGame Ventures had led today’s raise.
In doing so, the VC – which, per its website, supports “exceptional European entrepreneurs that are leading the global economy to a fully digital financial services future” – joined existing seed backers Raine Group, UTA Ventures, and Snö Ventures.
Regarding the “European entrepreneurs” point: Former Hipgnosis Song Management COO Björn Lindvall co-founded and leads MusicInfra.
Additionally, the business counts former YouTube publishing-partner engineering exec Greg Quillard as CTO and, when it comes to the initially mentioned hire, just recently added former Spotify songwriter- and publisher-partnerships head Jules Parker as chief business officer.
Likewise part of the startup – which says its “recognition and matching systems are built to rapidly increase connections between” usages and creators – are former Meta music higher-up Aileen Atkins (head of partnerships) and more than 15-year Gracenote vet Jake Harris (senior data engineer), to name a couple.
Back to the $5 million tranche, MusicInfra intends to put a portion of the capital towards building out its team, with a particular eye on engineers and go-to-market employees.
On the horizon as well is a push to continue onboarding larger platform and publisher clients, according to MusicInfra. And in a statement, Lindvall said the raise “validates our mission and accelerates our ability to build critical infrastructure for the music industry.”
“Our team brings together decades of experience building the systems that power today’s music ecosystem, and with this investment and the team’s collective expertise, we’re perfectly positioned to positively impact one of the industry’s most persistent challenges and help improve the music landscape for all participants,” proceeded Lindvall, who also has a stake in live events software developer Bassline.
In the bigger picture, MusicInfra’s $5 million funding disclosure has arrived only days after OpenPlay, describing itself as “the world’s first asset relationship management system,” secured a “multi-million dollar strategic investment round.”
That round was led by former Downtown CCO Tracy Maddux, who joined 12-year-old OpenPlay’s board. OpenPlay is said to be teeing up new products for “the coming months,” and a rep opted against shedding light on the raise’s valuation specifics.
