Photo Credit: Mogul
SoundCloud exec-founded royalty platform Mogul raises $5 million in a new round of funding led by the Yamaha Music Innovations Fund.
Mogul, a platform for artists to track their income and royalties, has announced raising $5 million in a new round of funding led by the Yamaha Music Innovations Fund. The company, founded by former SoundCloud execs Jeff Ponchick and Joey Mason, also announced that it has helped artists track over $1.5 billion in lost royalties since its launch last year.
The funding round also included participation from the Urban Innovation Fund, Mindset Ventures, and Fairway Capital Partners, alongside existing investors Amplify L.A. and Wonder Ventures. To date, the company has raised over $6.3 million in funding.
“A universal source of truth for music royalties has long been the industry’s holy grail,” said Ponchick. “Instead of forcing a top-down solution, trying to wrangle labels, publishers, CMOs, and others, Mogul starts at the data itself by bringing together the fragmented metadata that determines payouts and turning it into a clear, actionable view of an artist’s income, with tools to surface and resolve issues fast.”
Since its debut last year, Mogul has already evolved. Initially, the platform only provided users with a list of recommendations, but Mogul now offers more actionable information. This includes better formats for lists, as well as cross-platform corrections.
“For example, SoundExchange is an entity that collects royalties for digital performance for when your music gets played on SiriusXM,” Ponchick explained to TechCrunch. “If your SoundExchange is linked, well say, ‘hey, we see you distributed these songs through DistroKid to Spotify; half of them are not in your SoundExchange account.’”
If there is missing information, Ponchick says the tool can prompt the user and then complete the registration on their behalf. There’s even a bulk registration option to add large quantities of data in one go. According to Ponchick, artists have on average seen a 20% increase in their royalty revenues through Mogul.
“Mogul is addressing one of the largest structural inefficiencies in the creator economy: fragmented data across royalties, revenues, and payments,” added Andrew Kahn, Managing Partner at Yamaha. “By aggregating hundreds of sources into a unified platform, they’re shrinking the tech stack for creators while unlocking faster, more accurate compensation. This combination of broad applicability and deep product execution creates defensibility, and while music is the most visible entry point, the opportunity extends well beyond it.”
Mogul also recently added a catalog valuation tool that can estimate an artist’s catalog value across both recording and publishing. While the platform hasn’t yet decided how to tackle the question of AI-generated music for tracking purposes, Ponchick says it’s something being discussed; however, he noted that fully AI-generated music “might face scrutiny on certain platforms.”
The company currently counts six people on its staff, with plans to grow the team with the new funds.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.digitalmusicnews.com ’
