Founderfuel Graduate Raises $500,000 from Real Ventures and BDC Venture Capital
Montreal startup MFive Labs announced this morning that it has raised a seed financing round of $500,000 led by Real Ventures and including BDC Venture Capital.
MFive is a graduate of both FounderFuel (thrid cohort) and Launchpad LA and is the startup behind Listn, which also launched today.
According to today’s press release, Listn is “the first music app that creates relationships through music by harnessing the social experience of sevices such as Instagram and the streaming horsepower of the most popular music streaming services on the planet.”
The platform pulls music from sources such as iTunes, Spotify, YouTube and Soundcloud, and assembles it in one place to make it easy for users to share their music collection with friends, no matter what the source.
Contrary to most music apps that offer no way to interact with services outside of their own mobile experiences, the Listn platform ties together all of the users’ music in one place and lets them listen to all of their friends’ music, whether they have that music on their phone or not.
Much like sifting through albums at the record store, users browse the album artwork attached to each song and expose conversations around the music shared within the Listn community. From there users can navigate to anyone’s profile, search for friends, follow them and even stream their friends’ music on their own device.
“Listn embraces the openness of the mobile web and its potential to bring people closer together,” says Mike Schmidt, cofounder and CEO of MFive Labs, “and just like Instagram helps people share experiences through pictures, Listn connects people through music by enabling users to browse each other’s music collection, whether they are best friends or even strangers.”
At launch the app scans the users’ music library and algorithmically links each song to the most appropriate music source, whether that be on Spotify, Rdio, Soundcloud or YouTube, thus avoiding all copyright infringements and the need to have a music license.
“We’re extremely excited to work with the Listn team,” added Chris Burton, Business Development and Strategic Partnerships Manager at Rdio. “Their approach is a clever way to work in tandem with the copyright and licensing issues often faced by other popular music services, making our services absolutely complementary.”
Photo: Listn
