The Echo Nest builds machine‑learning driven music intelligence and one of the largest repositories of music data, housing 5 billion data points from over 30 million songs. It offers a B2B API and analytics used by more than 340 developers and partners including Spotify, VEVO, iHeartRadio, eMusic, MOG, Nokia and the BBC. The company powers Spotify Radio and provides personalized recommendation features for partners, exposing content to over 150 million end users per month. Operational metrics reported include a 20x increase in monthly query volume to 250 million queries and sales growth of seven‑fold over the past 18 months. The Somerville‑based startup grew out of its founders' MIT Media Lab dissertation work in 2005 and currently has a team of about 40, which the company expects to expand. Echo Nest plans to scale international sales, marketing and business development and to extend its music‑based prediction research beyond music into other areas of user profiling. The Echo Nest builds a music intelligence platform and a suite of APIs that interpret audio signals to identify genres, tempos, transition types and harmonies. Its technology powers music discovery, interactive music games, remix apps and analytics-driven marketing for digital-music developers. The company’s APIs are used by services including Spotify and MOG. The platform was created by two MIT Media Lab PhD students. The Echo Nest raised $7 million in a round led by Matrix Partners with participation from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, bringing total funding to over $9 million. The article frames the product as addressing a large and growing online music catalog (roughly 10 million songs online, with thousands of new songs and music reviews added daily) to support developer-facing applications. The Echo Nest offers what it calls the 'musical brain,' a platform that synthesizes music information by analyzing bloggers' commentary, tempo, harmonic structure and other characteristics. The company released development tools to let other sites incorporate the Echo Nest platform into their content. It was founded by two PhD students at the MIT Media Lab and is based in Somerville, MA. The Echo Nest has raised an undisclosed first round led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures with participation from angel investors. No revenue or user metrics are disclosed in the article.

Total raised

$24M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2012