Musical artificial intelligence, a startup focused on attribution and rights management for generative artificial intelligence, has raised $4.5M US in new funding to accelerate deployment of its proprietary attribution technology. The round was led by enterprise infrastructure investor Heavybit, with participation from BDC and Build Ventures, and will be used to expand the company’s team, advance its attribution tools and support new industry deals. The company positions its platform as core infrastructure that allows artificial intelligence developers to work with fully licensed media while maintaining transparent links between training data and generated content.
The core of Musical artificial intelligence’s offering is an attribution system that can determine which inputs contributed to a specific generative artificial intelligence output and in what proportion. The attribution technology can parse what percentage of a generated output came from which source, allowing rights holders to see exactly how their works are used. Chief executive and co founder Sean Power said the company has disproved claims that attribution, licensing and artificial intelligence are incompatible or only viable for the largest players, arguing that Musical artificial intelligence has made attribution simple and turnkey. Heavybit general partner Jesse Robbins described the platform as essential infrastructure for every media focused artificial intelligence product, giving companies a seamless way to license, train and use content while ensuring creators are credited and paid properly.
Musical artificial intelligence’s platform is designed to serve both sides of the artificial intelligence training ecosystem: data providers and artificial intelligence companies that need high quality inputs. Rights holders can monitor, take down and sunset usage of works they own, while generative artificial intelligence companies can access quality licensed data and use detailed reports to monitor usage and pay rights holders on an ongoing basis. The company has signed partnerships with audio rights holders including sound effects library Pro Sound Effects, production library SourceAudio and independent distributor Symphonic Distribution. Its services have already supported products such as SoundBreak, formerly SESHY, which used Musical artificial intelligence to ensure its models were trained only on licensed works attributable to the correct rights holders. SoundBreak chief executive and co founder Kevin Griffin said its business is built upon using licensed data sets with attribution for its artificial intelligence model, making the partnership a natural fit. Power added that the company aims to provide attribution and licensing infrastructure to everyone working with generative artificial intelligence so that intellectual property can be licensed and all involved rights holders paid accurately and consistently, with the goal of ensuring human creativity is enriched rather than undermined by artificial intelligence.
