Tl;dr: The code is done. Mainnet launch is coming. And Audius now has a deep bench of crypto-native investors who will help our community make open audio possible.We’re excited to announce that Audius has raised $3.1M in a strategic round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Pantera Capital, Collab+Currency, and Coinbase Ventures. To date, Audius has raised $8.6M, including prior investments from General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Pantera Capital and Kleiner Perkins.It’s been a crazy ride since we got started in mid 2018. Since then, we:
Throughout all this, the community has been growing like crazy:
Today, there are more than 250,000 fans using Audius every month.
We’ve been incredibly humbled to see some artists we’ve followed since well before Audius was founded finding their way to the service today, including RAC, deadmau5, Lido, Mr. Carmack, 3LAU, Zeds Dead, REZZ, and so many more. But we’re even more humbled that more than 40,000 artists have shared their music with the community — to the tune of 80,000+ tracks so far!
Today’s news is exciting for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is the strategic value these new investors bring to the table. We are getting support from some of the best minds that crypto has to offer, including Kyle Samani, Ken Seif, Paul Veradittakit, Steve Mckeon, and the Coinbase Ventures team, all of whom will help us cross the bridge into being a live, generally available protocol. They are all strategic assets that will improve and grow this service that you all own and operate.
This also marks the first public step towards the launch of the new staking system. Once live, creator nodes and discovery services can start earning real value for the work they are doing.
We’ve been referring to the upcoming launch as the “Audius mainnet,” which marks the official crossing over point into Audius being a sustainable, decentralized network, instead of being powered by the altruism of the community.
This financing, and our upcoming mainnet launch, are key steps in the long-term roadmap towards our ultimate mission: to give everyone the freedom to share, monetize, and listen to any audio. There will be much more to share soon. But consider this the beginning of our coming out party — Audius has arrived, and we brought a keg. Will you help us finish it?
