Startups & Funding
Mogul raises $5M to scale music royalty tracking platform
Mogul, a music royalty tracking platform, raised $5 million in new funding to expand its services after helping artists track $1.5 billion in lost royalties.
On Tuesday, music royalty tracking platform Mogul announced it has raised $5 million in a new round of funding. The round was led by Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, bringing the startup’s total funding to date to more than $6.3 million. Mogul, which currently has six people on staff, plans to use the capital to grow its team. Since its launch last year, the company has helped artists track $1.5 billion in lost royalties.
The funding round included participation from:
- Yamaha Music Innovations Fund (lead)
- Urban Innovation Fund
- Mindset Ventures
- Fairway Capital Partners
- Amplify LA (existing investor)
- Wonder Ventures (existing investor)
The platform aims to resolve data fragmentation for residual income earners—creators who receive ongoing royalties—by connecting disparate royalty sources. For example, Mogul links digital performance royalty collection entities like SoundExchange with distribution platforms like DistroKid and streaming services like Spotify. If an artist’s SoundExchange account is linked, Mogul can identify songs distributed through DistroKid to Spotify that are missing from the SoundExchange account. According to founder Jeff Ponchick, users have seen a 20% bump in their royalty revenues on average by using the platform. Investors point to Mogul’s underlying data infrastructure as its primary advantage. Andrew Kahn, managing partner at Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, stated: “We believe that Mogul has built the most comprehensive, first-party data pipeline that exists for residual income earners.” Kahn added that most companies in the space have limited connectivity to payers, whereas Mogul’s pipeline offers greater accuracy and speed.
Mogul is also preparing for the complexities of AI-generated music. Kahn noted that the current infrastructure was built for human creators, and that high-volume, probabilistic authorship could make tracking, allocating, and defending claims to intellectual property and royalties more difficult. While Mogul is currently waiting to see how the regulatory landscape plays out, Ponchick asserted that the company is well-positioned to track royalties for any kind of tracks. The startup operates in a competitive landscape alongside platforms like Notes.fm and Claimity. Structural shifts are also occurring in the U.S. market, where AllTrack, a performing rights organization—an entity that collects royalties for music performances—launched a new division in 2024 to allow creators to collect performance and mechanical royalties from a single place.
Why it matters
Mogul is positioning its data-layer platform as a solution for artists to manage complex royalty streams and catalog valuations, while navigating the emerging challenges of AI-generated music tracking.