Backed by Sir Paul McCartney and Björn Ulvaeus, Audoo raises £7.2 million in new funding round

Audoo, a London-based music tech company working to ensure that artists and composers receive the royalties they’re owed, has raised £7.2 million in a pre-Series B funding round. The new capital is aimed at amping up the company's growth into new markets as it expands across Europe, North America, and the APAC region. In just under three years, the audiotech has raised over £14 million.

The startups’ Audio Meter device is small enough to plug into any electrical outlet and uses a circular microphone array to capture music being played in public venues (pubs, gyms, shops, etc.). Audoo then uses signal processing techniques to strip out any foreground noise, i.e. patron’s conversations, thus remaining GDPR compliant.

From there, Audoo’s proprietary algorithm then matches the audio captured against a database of some 75 million tracks on file, and ta-da, highly accurate reporting, and most importantly, compensation for the creators and rights holders of said tunes.

With inaccurate royalty payments being one of the biggest challenges, a $2.7 billion annual challenge, to the music industry, past and present, Audoo is hoping to remove the ‘future’ part of this equation. Part of this problem revolves around the traditional method of manually collecting data played at commercial venues, or worse yet, relying on data analysis, profiling license holders, and then comparing them to popular radio play.

At best, highly subjective. And yet, artists and producers can at times spend days pouring over just one section of a song. The disparity is real.

Founder and CEO Ryan Edwards commented, “We are proud to have secured even more investment as part of our mission to help ensure artists are paid fairly after decades of missing out due to outdated processes. The mission is everything to us, and to have the continued support from our musical heroes like Björn further helps deliver our vision globally.”

Audoo’s £7.2 million pre-Series B funding round was led by existing investor single-family office Edinv, and saw a significant follow-on from Tileyard London, with new investor Sir Paul McCartney’s MPL Ventures also participating.