Riding on the wave of its stellar $16 million seed round, Royal, a music rights startup, had major success in its latest funding round. The company banked $55 million from a16z, which is Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto agency.
Royal represents artists’ works in collective ownerships, an initiative which was led by Justin Blau, or more popularly known as 3LAU, an EDM artist, as well as Opendoor’s co-founder JD Ross. The company is making waves in NFT functionality in music, which is a new direction in the artistic side of things, besides gaming and visual art works.
Just last month, 3LAU gave away 50% of the streaming rights of his latest song by means of NFTs through the platform. Secondary sales for those tokens have already started pouring in, and amount to up to $600,000 in value. Taking this successful step as inspiration, the company has been able to capture the attention of market participants by backing other projects and already raising millions in the process.
Royal has been a novel project and has plenty of security laws to navigate as they push ahead in the industry. Luckily, the latest investments indicate a positive direction, as it has captured the interest of Katie Haun, who not only is a leading executive of a16 z but is also a board member of successful market leaders like Coinbase and Opensea. In addition, a former partner at a16z, Nathan Jones, had joined Royal way back in Sept. and took on the role of Head of Growth.
A lot of musical artists also took part in the latest round – including popular names like The Chainsmokers, Kygo and Nas.
