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XElevation Ventures Is Raising $50M for a Climate-Focused Tech Fund in SoCal
Deirdre Newman
Deirdre Newman is an Orange County-based journalist, editor and author and the founder of Inter-TECH-ion, an independent media site that reports on tech at the intersection of diversity and social justice.
Interest in electric cars is spiking as gas prices rise to their highest prices in years, but supply chain headaches and the lack of infrastructure such as charging stations are keeping the demand pent up. And, the longer-term effects on power grids will mean there will be lots to upgrade, even after the transition to cleaner technology, like electric vehicles, comes online.
Elevation Ventures, a new climate-focused venture firm in Orange County, is raising a $50 million fund to focus on technology that can provide new products and services. The fund will target seed-stage companies in SoCal, though it might also invest in a few Series A funding rounds. Check sizes will range from $500,000 to $3 million.
Elevation has partnered with two local organizations with deep roots in O.C.: business incubator Octane and Sustain SoCal, a network of professionals focused on clean tech development.
A VC Built By Consortium
Elevation Ventures Managing Partner Neal Rickner is an Orange County native who recently moved back to the area from Silicon Valley, where he was the COO of Makani Technologies, a company that developed airborne wind turbines. It was acquired by Google in 2013, and then eventually shut down by Alphabet, Google's parent company.
Elevation Ventures Managing Partner Neal Rickner.
Image courtesy of Neal Rickner
He also worked with what’s known as “X,” (formerly Google X), a research and development facility founded by Google, which now operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet.
”I’ve been through the ringer...up there,” he said. “I learned the best I could from the best innovators in the world."
But it wasn’t until Rickner did some serious reflection in 2020, that he decided to move back to Orange County. He had some informal conversations with members from Aliso Viejo-based Octane’s team in 2017, but it didn’t coalesce until 2020. Octane acted as the catalyst and facilitator, bringing in Sustain Socal. Elevation Ventures was formed.
Octane already has a track record in investing. In 2016, it partnered with Visionary Ventures, a VC firm that backs ophthalmology and aesthetic startups, which have a strong presence in Orange County.
The organization has both for-profit and nonprofit branches and serves SoCal’s general technology and medical technology ecosystems—connecting people, resources and capital. One of its initiatives is a four-month accelerator program called LaunchPad that gives local founders access to a slew of advisors and resources.
Sustain SoCal is a hub of climate, sustainability and environmental experts, with a presence at UC Irvine’s innovation center, The Cove. The network comprises thousands of experts; most have been involved with clean tech and/or climate tech for 20 years or more.
Elevation expects to make 15 to 20 investments from this first fund, over the next two to three years, Rickner said. Even before the first close of the first fund, expected this summer, Elevation is already writing checks through a type of investing known as a special purpose vehicle. Typically set up as an LLC or limited partnership company, SPVs make a single investment into just one company.
Rickner, Octane CEO Bill Carpou and Sustain SoCal CEO Scott Kitcher put together a mission statement for their new venture firm in the fall.
”The three of us bring together the core ingredients for a VC fund to succeed,” he said. “And, we complement each other well. We have different networks and skill sets, but we’re mission-aligned and collectively-aligned.”
The team hopes to raise around $20 million by the summer. It’s raised just over $10 million so far, Rickner said.
“The first commitments are all from SoCal and know Octane or SoCal well,” Rickner said, adding that they’re targeting high net-worth individuals and family offices.
Elevation recently also brought on longtime climate technology investor Rachel Payne and former Seeder Clean Energy co-founder Alex Shoer.
Early Investments
Elevation’s first investment, for which it raised more than $1 million, was in Los Angeles-based Veloce Energy. The startup runs a software platform and installation system to enhance the move to a decentralized, distributed energy grid that enables anyone to trade electricity on its networks.
Rickner said companies like Veloce can accelerate the shift to these decentralized power systems “faster and cheaper” than enormous electricity providers.
In late April, the firm made its second investment (also through an SPV) in Carbon Collective.
The Alameda-based startup enables employees to use their retirement funds to fight climate change by divesting from companies that contribute to climate change and to re-invest in companies working to combat the climate crisis.
“Venture deals move quickly,” Rickner said, in explaining why he opted to raise money quickly via SPV rather than waiting for the fund to close. “These first two deals were great opportunities. We had special access, and we didn't want to pass them up.”
Rickner declined to disclose the amount of either investment.
Photo by Tyler Casey on Unsplash
Next Industrial Revolution
It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Silicon Valley.
“Part of the allure for me was [the opportunity to] work on something I’ve been passionate about for a long time,” Rickner said.
He credits the pandemic and lockdowns that followed with inspiring him, like many others, to reflect on what was important.
“A lot of people woke up and decided we had to take better care of our environment, that climate change was happening,” he added. ”When you take time, you realize there are more floods and fires and extreme events, and it became personal to a lot of folks."
Elevation will have plenty of opportunities to invest close to home, Rickner noted. Orange County is home to some of the biggest names in electric vehicles, including electric pickup truck maker Rivian Automotive, which is headquartered in Irvine.
But it will also have local competition. Laguna Beach-based Keiki Capital launched in 2017 to invest in climate tech startups at the pre-seed and seed level.
Rickner sees the time we’re living in as a transition into the next industrial revolution—and he sees opportunities.
“90% of the world economy, as measured by country GDP, has committed to net zero,” he said, referring to several nations’ pledges to move to power sources that are carbon neutral.
More than half of the world’s corporate and financial institutions, as measured by revenue and assets under management, have committed to a net-zero approach, he added.
“The previous industrial revolutions produced many billionaires,” Rickner said. “And this one will do the same.”
Deirdre Newman
Deirdre Newman is an Orange County-based journalist, editor and author and the founder of Inter-TECH-ion, an independent media site that reports on tech at the intersection of diversity and social justice.
Stem Raises $20 Million To Help Music Artists Get Paid
04:45 PM | April 18, 2022
Courtesy of Stem.
Stem, a music tech startup focused on helping artists with distribution and payments, has raised $20 million in a new funding round.
Fintech-focused venture capital firm QED Investors led the funding and was joined by Block, the Jack Dorsey-led payments tech company formerly known as Square. Block notably paid nearly $300 million last year to acquire a majority stake in TIDAL, the music streaming service backed by rapper Jay-Z.
Existing investors Slow Ventures and Quality Control also pitched in on Stem’s new round, which takes the Los Angeles-based startup’s total funding to around $40 million.
Since launching in 2015, Stem has merged financial management tools with music distribution capabilities, working with independent record labels like Big Loud as well as major artists like Wiz Khalifa. Its dashboard includes tools for artists, managers and labels to oversee their revenues, split funds with collaborators and receive automated payments. While only Stem-distributed artists can currently access its financial tools, the new funds will go toward expanding the platform’s existing royalty accounting features to other music distributors.
Stem co-founder and CEO Milana Lewis told dot.LA that she launched the startup based on her experiences as a talent agent for industry heavyweight United Talent Agency—a role in which she saw firsthand how difficult it was for artists trying to aggregate multiple revenue streams. Stem was born out of Lewis’ desire to streamline the process.
“Getting into music has always been hard for anyone that works in music,” Lewis said. “There’s this notion of a starving artist for a reason: It’s because the business is really complex, and it’s gotten more complex.”
With avenues for music monetization—from streaming platforms to home devices—constantly expanding, Stem aims to provide artists with a “financial backbone” allowing them to plan their projects and income, Lewis added.
“Our belief is: What if we build a system that can become the system of record for who gets paid what and how?” she said. “It makes it possible for other really interesting economic things to happen for artists.”
Stem is among a new generation of startups that are turning L.A. into a music tech hotbed—a trend that makes sense given the city's status as a global entertainment capital and home to major labels like Universal Music Group. Last week saw Trac, another startup distribution platform for music artists, raise $2.5 million in new funding, as dot.LA reported.
While streaming has helped the music business evolve its revenue model, that hasn't always been to the benefit of artists: Spotify recently revealed that most artists earned less than $10,000 through its platform in 2021. In turn, some independent musicians have protested against the streaming giant over its low royalty payments.
From Your Site Articles
- Trac Raises $2.5 Million To Help Artists Monetize Music - dot.LA ›
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- LA's Music-Tech Startups Are Poised to Reshape the Industry. - dot.LA ›
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Kristin Snyder
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
https://twitter.com/ksnyder_db
The Pandemic Has Changed the Music Industry Forever. Meet the LA Music-Tech Startups Poised to Reshape It.
06:45 AM | August 19, 2020
Image courtesy of Wave
- The pandemic has ravaged the music industry, but music-tech companies are poised to drive its growth into an industry where a music company is much more than music.
- Los Angeles is home to a bustling ecosystem of startups empowering musicians through a variety of next-generation technologies.
- The Takeaway: Innovations in music-tech offer new tools to independent artists to help them create music, manage money, reach fans and share their music in vivid, immersive ways.
The pandemic has hushed the music industry. Throbbing concert crowds have disappeared, artists' sales have plummeted and musicians' overall income has fallen precipitously. But a handful of Los Angeles-based tech startups are providing musicians with everything from socially-distanced collaborative recording to simplified back-office accounting.
"The L.A. music-tech scene is primed to drive this industry forward," says Ed Buggé, partner at L.A.-based entertainment law firm Hertz Lichtenstein & Young. "It's a hugely exciting time in the industry, with startup-driven disruption enabling new models for artists and media companies alike."
Buggé, who advises some of the world's leading tech and media companies, says the ecosystem of music-tech startups is poised to accelerate two big trends in the music industry.
One is the rise of independent artists. In 2018, indies – artists who own most or all of their material – earned 6.6% of total recorded music revenues. That's a 78% growth rate from 2015, which makes independent artists the fastest growing segment of the recorded music market. Entertainment research firm MIDiA says this change "could prove to be more impactful than even the rise of streaming."
The other trend startups are speeding up is the transformation of what a music company even is.
"Music is no longer just music," says Buggé, adding that audio is becoming inseparable from technologies spanning artificial intelligence, gaming, social media, as well as augmented and virtual reality.
Recording Studios at Home
Musicians today have far more access to high-quality production tools and capabilities than they once did.
Software packages like Logic Pro or Ableton have brought the recording studio's physical equipment and professional engineers right into an artist's living room, saving them thousands of dollars.
"In 2020, all you really need is the essentials – your phone, your laptop, and a good pair of headphones," says Americo Garcia, aka Boombox Cartel. Add in a good $100 microphone or two and an instrument and you've got a home studio.
"Back in the day you'd have to ship reels of tape and jump hoops and loops just to make a song happen. Nowadays you can email someone in Poland and say, 'hey man, let's start something,'" Garcia says. In addition to tools like Dropbox that enable file-sharing across the world, several companies have emerged to help musicians find and work with each other.
"If you think you need a label to blow up, you're wrong," Garcia says.
Meet Your Bandmates
Musicians' Jammcard profiles help them to collaborate
L.A.-based Jammcard has been called the "LinkedIn for musicians." Founded in 2017 by professional drummer Elmo Lovano, the company has nearly 10,000 members and has raised around $2 million from Quincy Jones, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Lionsgate President Robby Melnick.
Lovano formed the company to streamline the process by which professional musicians find each other, rather than relying on word-of-mouth. He estimates that as many as 95% of Jammcard members are independent, and that their median income is around $70,000.
"A lot of the people that are on Jammcard are the people that support the big artists; Kendrick Lamar's not on Jammcard, but his entire band and crew are," Lovano says. "Sound engineers, stage managers, guitar techs – we like to say that it's for 'anyone that's on the bus or in the studio'."
Lovano says Jammcard is finalizing partnerships with Sony and Fender and has recently expanded its platform to enable digital payments to members for collaborating, performing and teaching. Jammcard also recently partnered with New York-based Splice, an online music production service that offers downloadable samples and plugins that make it "a lot more accessible and intuitive to start creating music," says Ankur Patel, Splice's head of corporate development. Jammcard's artists can host their sound samples on Splice and share in the proceeds.
Soundstorming is another L.A. company using tech to enable artistic collaborations. Users upload small segments of their self-produced audio files, allowing other members on the platform to provide feedback and even layer in their own bass grooves, vocal melodies, and drum beats to collectively compose a new track.
Build Your Own Label
Former UTA agent Milana Lewis created Stem Disintermedia in 2015 to "alleviate back office work so an artist can eliminate those costs and release content more easily."
Stem co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis
As an agent, Lewis saw how the complexities of music copyright were depriving musicians of opportunities to make money. "The administrative work was too burdensome for any individual artist to do," she told dot.LA. Artists would give up and say, ''I'm just going to put it up for free'" on sites like YouTube and Soundcloud.
Stem has raised over $12 million in funding, including two rounds from L.A. firm Upfront Ventures. The startup also recently launched its own $100 million debt-financing arm to allow artists to borrow money against their existing catalogs.
Stem's interface helps artists and their managers track their finances
Create Music Group, another startup formed in 2015 that helps artists take control of their accounting and distribution, has a similar origin story.
"We realized the YouTube landscape was poorly mismanaged," recalls Sam Casucci, partner and senior vice president of digital strategy at Create, recently named the second-fastest growing company in the country in the annual Inc. 5000 list. Create employs about 120 people and serves over 10,000 clients – mostly indie artists and labels, the company says. "There was a lot of music and (rights holders) who weren't getting paid what they should be," Casucci says. Create has since built technology on top of YouTube's rights-management platform to help artists make money.
Create Music Group's Hollywood office
Independent artist and Create client Ray J told dot.LA, "They help you study everything that's going on and help you find money you might not have even known existed."
"When you sign to a major label you don't really get to see what's going on behind the scenes," says Ray J. "You can become your own record label now."
Create's dashboard to help musicians manage their copy rights
Get Paid
Elsewhere in L.A., Pex helps artists manage their monetization by following the data associated with their songs across the web. Wilson Hays, head of business development, says Pex monitors over 20 billion songs and videos on dozens of social media platforms.
The company indexes all that data – which comprises over three-times as much content as what's on YouTube, Hays says – and uses patented technology to allow the people behind the music to track and measure its online activity. It even allows artists to easily issue take-down notices if they wish.
Pex's song-tracking dashboard
"YouTube has Content ID and Facebook has Rights Manager, but outside those platforms, in the wild, you don't know how your content is being shared, moved, monetized, or pirated," Hays says. "We want to put control back in rights holders' hands."
That sort of control offers benefits to artists that they wouldn't necessarily have with a traditional label deal. One benefit is that payments come in faster. It also gives artists more freedom to manage their career trajectory.
And that freedom gives artists the choice in how they use the many emerging mediums by which they can share their music.
Reach an Audience
An artist who wants to interact directly with fans can post their songs on a host website like YouTube, TikTok, Soundcloud or Bandcamp and chat with their audiences on social media channels. But these platforms have limitations.
A post on Instagram, for example, carries no guarantee that it will reach an artist's fans; most followers do not see every post. Artists must also contend with the fact that the interests of social media platforms are not always aligned with their own.
Jake Udell, a music manager and entrepreneur with a reputation for digital wizardry, recognized social media's limitations early on.
"The thing I kept noticing was that the algorithms were making it really challenging for us to reach our audiences," Udell told dot.LA. "I didn't think there was a fix, though. We'd given up and sort of ceded our audiences to these social platforms."
Then he conducted an experiment. Tickets went on sale for an artist of his who had about twice as many fans in L.A. than New York. Not surprisingly, about twice as many purchases came in for the L.A. shows than the New York ones. Udell then decided to collect around 1,000 phone numbers from fans at a New York show.
"We found some random texting service online and just blasted them out," he recalls. "What happened next changed the way I thought about building audiences online forever."
7,000 tickets to two New York shows immediately sold out. Udell wrote about it on his blog, which is how he met Matthew Pelltier, chief executive of L.A.-based Community.com, where Udell is now head of activation.
"The algorithm has not really been an enabler" for musicians, Udell says. "What if we could just meet the fans where they're already at?"
That's exactly what Community does, he says, by providing artists (and other "Leaders") a SaaS platform for exchanging text messages with fans en masse.
"I think about it like this," Udell says. "How many social platforms have you joined over the last 10 years? Versus how many times did your phone number change?...The phone number is a true atomic unit of identity; it's not going anywhere."
What's more, Udell says 98% of text messages get opened in the first three minutes.
"On other platforms there's a guarantee of instant publishing, but there's no guarantee of instant distribution," he says. Whereas with Community, "the idea that you will always be able to reach your fans, this community, via text, is a really empowering thing not just for you personally but for your business."
Big-timers like Jennifer Lopez use Community, as do aspiring local band types. Prices depend on audience size. One feature: ability to segment fan outreach so that, for instance, a band coming to a specific town can message only the locals – "See you at the show tonight?"
Tour Virtually
Wave turns performers into digital avatars and puts them on virtual stages where they can entertain and interact with fans, who tune in via VR headset, gaming console or web browser.
"We started the company four years ago to help musicians make money," Wave chief executive Adam Arrigo told dot.LA. "We've been touring musicians and we know how hard it is."
Wave has now hosted over 50 events. Its recent concert featuring The Weeknd in partnership with TikTok reportedly drew a digital audience of over 2 million fans.
A Wave concert of Swedish band Galantis
Arrigo says his former role as a designer for the Rock Band video game franchise showed him how novel technologies can empower musicians.
"From working on that game I learned that when you create new experiences you can create additional revenue streams for the industry," he says.
Building on a blueprint established in part by L.A.-based Brud (whose digital influencer and singer Lil' Miquela currently has 2.6 million Instagram followers and attracts millions of views on YouTube), Strangeloop Studios is currently designing a cast of animated characters of its own.
Co-founder and chief executive Ian Simon, who is also on the creative team at Wave, says, "the long-term vision is to be a studio; to bring in storytellers and visual artists and creators to tell stories using these characters. The characters are a medium in themselves."
A character from Strangeloop Studios' virtual artist label, Spirit BombStrangeloop Studios
Those characters present musicians with scalable creative opportunities. "You can play the same show with the same character in multiple places at the same time," Simon says. "They're vessels for human collaboration – multiple musicians contributing songs, various visual artists creating content and fans informing the narrative and aesthetic trajectory of the characters."
"People are already listening to music on screens, even if the screen isn't really being leveraged," says Simon, whose small team includes former visual designers for megastars like Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus.
Immersive Music
ViRvii – a portmanteau of virtual, visual, and immersive – gives artists a new "paintbrush" for creating immersive fan experiences, says founder Juan Dueñas, who formerly founded My Mixtapez and was an early user of Oculus' development kit.
Dueñas says ViRvii will allow fans to "hang out" inside The Beatles' Yellow Submarine while the album plays in the background, for instance. Contemporary artists will be able to design VR experiences to accompany their releases. Despite the high-tech approach, Dueñas says he wants users to be able to get a homespun feeling of "sitting around a stereo or record player and smoking a joint and drinking a beer with friends and listening to your favorite album."
ViRvii's continuous VR world will immerse fans into albums
Formed in 2019 and now with a staff of 30, the L.A.-based startup recently announced a partnership with Facebook and its Oculus VR subsidiary.
Splashmob gives performers control of their audience's cell phone screens. They can preprogram the screens of anyone who opts in with features like polls, audiovisual media to accompany the main show, and merchandise sales portals. The screens can also be controlled in real-time, not unlike an effects technician manipulating phone screens rather than lights and sound.
Founder Blaise Thomas was formerly a sound engineer in London, where his work in recording studios and live performances got him thinking about how to enhance concerts, whether in-person or streamed.
Splashmob's control panel gives performers the power to curate audience members' phone screens
"The flashlight on the phone is all well and good," Thomas says, "but how far can that go?"
Splashmob has collaborated with Dani Van de Sande and her L.A. startup, ULO, which along with Splashmob and Strangeloop was part of the 2020 Techstars Music cohort.
"Imagine you're wandering around Melrose Avenue on your way to dinner," Van de Sande writes, "and out of the corner of your eye you spot a bright, iridescent light. It looks otherworldly, like something from another universe."
These cocoon-like walk-in installations, called ULOs ("unidentified landing objects"), offer immersive, interactive experiences for the adventurous souls who enter. ULO plans to dot them around city-scapes.
"We're another avenue where artists can do something beyond releasing a video – by creating an experience for people," says Van de Sande, who formerly worked on augmented reality at L.A.-based Snap.
The Pandemic Has Changed the Music Industry Forever. Meet the LA Music-Tech Startups Poised to Reshape It.
StillVika
These new visually oriented channels for sharing music may help to shrink the gap between the ear and the eye that Spotify founder Daniel Ek often invokes when he describes the growth potential for his company. Why, he has publicly wondered, is the total video market worth around 10-times more than audio, even though consumers spend about equal time with each?
Get a Side Gig
Cameo offers anybody with over 20,000 Instagram followers the opportunity to build a profile on its platform and set a price for which they will record a personalized video message. The company was formed in Chicago, but its chief executive Steven Galanis recently moved to L.A. With his move, Cameo's center of gravity has shifted.
"L.A. is the best place for me to be for Cameo right now," Galanis recently told dot.LA. "I've been focused on being the tech company to work for in Chicago and I think that's mission accomplished in many ways. Now my objective is to make Cameo that place in L.A."
L.A. was once the destination for artists with a guitar case and a dream. Now, many of them can pursue those dreams from home. Music-tech companies, however, are flocking in.
"It's not an accident that Techstars Music is in L.A.," says Bob Moczydlowsky, who runs the accelerator, which recently opened its 2021 cohort application, with an emphasis on attracting a diverse candidate pool. Moczydlowsky attributes L.A.'s centrality in this flourishing wave of music and tech innovation to two main factors. First is the access to an ecosystem of artists, managers, labels and touring companies. Second is the venture money in Silicon Valley.
"L.A. is less than an hour from the money and down the street from the culture," he says.
The growing entrepreneurial energy in L.A. looks set to provide Angelenos a front-row seat to a new, lasting stage for entertainment technology innovation.
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Sam Blake primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Follow him on Twitter @hisamblake and email him at samblake@dot.LA
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Sam Blake
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
https://twitter.com/hisamblake
samblake@dot.la
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