An aerial shot of Paris, France, where Bridge.audio is headquartered. Photo Credit: Chris Hardy
Cloud-based music workspace Bridge.audio has announced a nearly $3.3 million raise and set its sights on optimizing sync discoverability with AI.
The Paris-headquartered startup’s founder and CEO, Clément Souchier, only recently disclosed the €3 million (currently $3.27 million) funding round via a LinkedIn post. As described by this message, the two-year-old business pulled down the capital from backers including Bpifrance, Liège-based investment fund LeanSquare, and “business angels.”
Now boasting more than 30,000 users, according to Souchier, Bridge.audio has developed a main offering encompassing music-centered “private workspaces to manage, share, and connect.” Beyond these “smart workspaces” as well as their activity-tracking and metadata-management features, the collaboration-focused service, operating in both English and French, has also created an AI-powered tagging and description technology, its website shows.
Running with the idea, last January saw Bridge.audio roll out an aptly named “Sync Hub” marketplace designed to connect audiovisual professionals with licensable music for their projects. Bearing in mind the AI-tagging emphasis, said marketplace supports “natural language searches,” per the longtime entrepreneur Souchier.
On the pricing front, Bridge.audio’s core collaboration service has a free tier and a paid option; the latter’s cost begins at $5 per month when billed annually and scales upward depending on the precise amount of sought storage.
Shifting to the bigger funding picture, industry and industry-adjacent raises, as compiled by DMN Pro’s comprehensive Music Industry Funding Tracker, have been comparatively few and far between in 2024.
That refers specifically to three industry raises for June of 2024 – down from 10 during the same month in 2023. May of 2024, for its part, likewise registered three publicly confirmed funding rounds, a material decrease from May of 2023’s 13 rounds.
Notwithstanding the apparent funding-quantity falloff, however, 2024 has delivered several particularly high-value raises, including but not limited to a $165 million strategic round for Create Music Group, a cool $1 billion for Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group, and $100 million for Gamma.
Now, on the momentum of two relatively modest raises (Bridge.audio’s $3.3 million and the $5 million that Created by Humans secured in late June), time will tell whether the final five or so months of 2024 usher in other smaller-scale showings of support.
As things stand, July of 2024 appears exceedingly unlikely to surpass or even approach the funding volume of the same month in 2023, which had already recorded 11 industry and sub-sector raises at this point. By comparison, Bridge.audio seems to be the first industry company to unveil fresh funding in the current month.
