investiere closes 1m round for iMusician

iMusician Digital AG was founded in 2007 by Shigs Amemiya and Tobias Wirz as an online platform where musicians anywhere in the world can create accounts and upload music to be sold in over 200 shops worldwide like iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. iMusician will now extend its offering by tackling the income loss due to the musicians’ widespread lack of knowledge and unawareness concerning copyright rules and ways to monetize these rights. In Switzerland alone, it is estimated that SUISA is sitting on between 50 – 100 million CHF in unclaimed revenue. iMusician now helps musicians to claim income that is rightfully theirs. In iMusician's words, "We look after copyrights for musicians in the same way an accountant looks after tax issues for small businesses".

Together with the private investment platform investiere, iMusician has successfully closed a CHF 1 million financing round finally giving it the firepower it needs to scale its business. Steffen Wagner, CEO of Verve Capital Partners AG which operates the investiere and now holds shares in iMusician comments, "Once again, our platform proved to be extremely valuable in identifying the best start-ups for our investors before others have it on their radar. iMusician is breaking even, shows strong growth and traction and has a market-driven team. Together with our private co-investors, we will now actively support iMusician to establish a cutting edge platform for musicians".

Closing the financing round was achieved with the commitment of numerous private investors from the investiere community who contributed an impressive CHF 450K alongside Zürcher Kantonalbank’s half million CHF. Not only does this broad investor base provide iMusician with the much needed expansion capital, it also brings with it the collective expertise of an impressive pool of individuals.

Jost Wirz, Honorary Chairman of WIRZ Group and Chairman of iMusician had this to say: "Not only did I find investiere's knowhow perfect for iMusician, but I was impressed by the quality of their investors, some of whom I know". iMusician has attracted board members from the pinnacle of its industry. Joining Jost Wirz are Scout24 founder Joachim Schoss and Sunrise CMO Timm Degenhardt. Moreover, Tim Renner, the ex-MD of Universal Music Germany joins the advisory board.

Shigs Amemiya, CEO of iMusician, was equally impressed. Coming from the industry that leads the social media push, he praised investiere's ability to bring venture capital into the new era: "We chose investiere because we come from the long tail, social media driven online world.  Of course, large investor pools require precise management but so far, investiere's experience in deal structuring and investor management has worked like clockwork". The investiere team shared its experience with managing complex financing rounds and played a syndication role coordinating with ZKB and proprietary investors. In closing, Shigs Amemiya simply added, "investiere over-delivered and I have to say that my experience has been very, very positive".