Musikki, the music startup providing B2C and B2B music services including the Musikki Music API, has successfully closed a new round of funding securing $ 1 million from Portugal Ventures, the biggest venture capital fund in Portugal. This continues Musikki’s successful initial funding secured by winning in 2012 the Building Global Innovators Venture Competition co-organised by the MIT, which provided the music-tech startup with $ 250K in first funding. Musikki also secured $ 500K from Intercapital and Smarty Equity, two investment firms focused on early-stage ventures.
Joao Afonso, co-founder and CEO of Musikki explains: “We set up Musikki as a consumer app, dubbed ‘the IMDB of music’, but quickly diversified the offering by launching the Music API which provides all the data, content and information needed to develop a new music service. The aim of the Musikki Music API is to provide everything except the music itself. And, it was during our quest to provide a one-stop solution for music app developers that we identified the need in the B2B space to easily access and manage high quality and official music photos. We are delighted to have received funding from Portugal Ventures, as this enables us to focus on the launch and marketing of Exclusiph, a service which we believe will truly disrupt not only the way we manage and distribute images in the music industry but in every industry where image and brand is important.”
Musikki launched Exclusiph with the new funds secured. It is an innovative and disruptive image management and distribution tool for the music industry. Exclusiph enables the distribution of images to any and many channels with just one file upload. By uploading a high-resolution file, e.g.TIFF, Exclusiph automatically generates the image for print as a digital download, and embeds it. Credits, music metadata and related content (press releases, video and audio links) can all be added to the image file, making Exclusiph the perfect tool for album promotion. Platform is already used by independent label Secretly Group, which features artists like Destroyer and Sharon Van Etten, and 4AD – they took part in the solution development and fine-tuning.
Exclusiph has started with the music industry, but will expand into other industry verticals such as film, fashion and sports, which also are heavily dependent on timely image management and distribution systems.
Musikki was founded in 2010 and is based in London, with a developing office in Porto, Portugal.