The a16z fund and Snoop Dogg have helped raise $20m in a music NFT startup

Sound music NFT startup raises $20M in another round of funding helped by a16z fund and Snoop Dogg

The a16z crypto fund (Andreessen Horowitz) led the round. Other investors included Sound Ventures, Collab + Currency, Scalar Capital, rapper Snoop Dogg, and Ryan Tedder.

According to Sound co-founder David Greenstein. And the funds will be used to hire new employees and expand in the online music space. And including on mobile devices.

All music on the Sound platform can be listened to for free. But when downloading them, the authors also issue NFT. Which gives the right to own the song. The price of the NFT is set by the author, and the platform takes a fixed commission for the issuance of each token. Songs in this format can be traded on the secondary market on NFT-marketplaces. The total revenue of musicians who have uploaded works to Sound, according to the platform, already reaches $5.5 million.

In December 2021, the startup led a $5 million seed investment round, which was also led by a16z.

In April, a16z also led a $120 million investment round for LayerZero Labs, the company behind the development of the LayerZero project. The project has raised more than $250 million from venture capitalists and is valued at $3 billion.

Our experts note that venture capital funding for the Web 3 segment fell sharply in the first quarter of this year. And that there is an 80% decrease compared to the same period last year. In the first three months of 2023, cryptocurrency venture capital funds made 353 transactions worth $2.6 billion. The number of transactions was 12.2% lower than in October-December 2022.