Music Ally SI:X is our annual showcase, contest and mentorship program for music-tech startups. We announced the 21 finalists for 2025 in October, and now they have been narrowed down to six winners.
Congratulations to Claimy, InTempo, MuseAI, Plates, Poison Pill and Tutti, who will all now be presenting at our Music Ally Connect conference in January.
They will also be offered mentorship from our SI:X partners this year: Amazon Music, Ascap Lab, Push Entertainment, Reed Smith, Rock Paper Scissors and Universal Music Group Digital Innovation.
Read on for mini-profiles of the six winners. And congratulations to the other 15 finalists too: they’re a snapshot of the creativity and innovation that’s being put to work in service of musicians, rightsholders and fans in 2025.
Claimy
French startup Claimy helps artists and rightsholders to identify missing royalty payouts from collecting societies. The company audits clients’ catalogues and then tracks recordings using those works, including covers, remixes and speed-changed edits on social media.
Claimy’s system then compares this data to their payout reports, and automatically generates claims for any missing payments. Having recently raised €1.5m of pre-seed funding, Claimy is already managing rights worth €6m across 160k works.
It plans to launch in more countries – it’s currently in France and the UK – as well as expanding the rights usages that it tracks for clients.
Claimy’s business model involves taking a 30% cut of any additional revenues it finds for customers. Like several other startups in this year’s SI:X lineup, it wants to show how AI can boost creators’ payouts, rather than cannibalising their existing income streams.
InTempo
With the world as it is right now, there are countless reasons for anxiety. But music can play a role in the treatment of those wellbeing challenges, and InTempo is one of the startups exploring how.
The Ukrainian firm’s first product is an app that aims to synchronise people’s heartbeat with the rhythm of music: a “phygital” game played by tapping the screen in time to a track, helping them to calm down and fend off panic attacks.
Players can customise the app based on their favourite genres but also their general stress level and current emotional state. The business model is subscription: €10 a month, or half price for students as well as all residents of Ukraine – and other countries involved in armed conflicts.
That’s the obvious context that has informed the birth of InTempo and its app. It’s now keen to forge partnerships with artists and labels to push on.
MuseAI
Australian startup MuseAI describes itself as a “second brain” for musicians: an app that collects together the beats, melodies and lyrics they’re working on, and makes it all easier to search.
MuseAI’s app can also be used to make new recordings; convert video to audio and to transcribe lyrics as someone sings into their phone’s microphone.
The AI elements include suggestions that remind musicians of what they’ve done and how it might fit together. “This loop matches your verse,” for example, or ‘You liked this chorus last Thursday”. Ideas can be tagged by mood, theme, key and BPM.
The startup is working on adding collaboration features. Its business model is freemium, with some free features and others unlocked through premium plans. There is also scope for partnerships with other kinds of music companies, from DAW firms to sync libraries.
Plates
Plates is a music marketing-tech startup with a snappy slogan calculated to appeal to marketers on the verge of burnout: “Music marketing is about to get easier.”
How? Plates pulls in a host of analytics data, from streaming and socials to revenues. But it has also built an AI that makes sense of this data and provides recommendations for its users, including what they should do when “surges” (for example TikTok spikes) are detected.
The company is targeting labels, managers, distributors and marketing agencies, while integrating data feeds from DSPs, social platforms and ticketing firms.
This is also another software-as-a-service (Saas) model, using seat-based pricing for individuals and companies. 14 clients have been putting the system through its paces during its pilot stages, including several well-known music companies.
Poison Pill
What to do about AI companies trying to scrape all of the world’s music without permission? British startup Poison Pill has an idea for a fightback: disrupt the scraping process as much as you can.
The company is using “adversarial noise algorithms” that can currently be used for JPEG and PNG images as well as for WAV and MP3 audio files. While the details of how this works are necessarily mysterious for now, the company says that it “preserves video and audio fidelity while disrupting model training”.
This idea of disruption is a wider trend: net-tech firm Cloudflare launched an AI bot-blocking button for its client to use for their websites last year. Poison Pill is the first startup we’ve seen in this space that is focused on music.
Currently in closed beta, it promises a drag’n’drop interface, starting with an annual subscription comparable to the cost of using a music distributor.
Tuttii
Tuttii is using AI to help fans remix tracks and share them on social media and video services. However, it is working carefully within the boundaries of the music industry with its licensed catalogue of music.
People can use its app to mash up tracks and share them on TikTok and SoundCloud, with the startup ensuring that a.) the remixes are not new registered works, and b.) that they can’t be downloaded or distributed to streaming services as if they were new recordings.
Tuttii has been working hard to enlist rightsholders in this vision, with Kobalt and Spirit Music Group among them. When the app launches commercially, it will include a royalties model for artists whose music is used on the platform.
Tuttii plans to make money from a mixture of subscriptions, ads and a la carte transactions – the latter being the ability for free users to buy access to stems from its licensed catalogue. Subscribers will get unlimited access.
