Mozaic has raised a USD 20 million Series A round of funding from Volition Capital. Mozaic has raised more than USD 27 million to date from investors like Rise of the Rest, Maverick Nashville, and music industry executive Joe Galante. The startup was founded with an aim to develop tools to handle different parts of the music business, ranging from credits management to ticketing.
Creators often work with different collaborators for different projects. And splitting payments with others is one of the biggest challenges for creators. Mozaic (previously Jammber) is trying to solve this problem through its range of solutions, including APIs and Chrome extensions.
Mozaic initially focused on B2B aspects of music but pivoted in 2020 to create a collaborative payments product due to the pandemic. The decision was validated by receiving 60 Letter of Intents (LOIs) from music distributors within 30 days after cold-calling 200.
The company committed to the new direction, and the early beta of the collaborative payments product launched in January 2022. The goal is to provide creators with a payment solution that transcends geographical limitations posed by platforms like PayPal, CashApp, Venmo, and Zelle.
Mozaic’s core product is its API, which can easily plug into platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, and other custom solutions.
Company officials said that typically a song has three to five collaborators and only the creator gets paid immediately. Mozaic solves the problem of uneven payment distribution in music collaborations by using JSON-based smart contracts (not the blockchain kind). These contracts automatically distribute payments to various collaborators based on project rules, simplifying the process.
Artists directly receive payments and reports about different projects on the platform. If they don’t have an account, they will need to sign up with basic info to start getting payments automatically. Mozaic takes a fee of 1.99% + USD 1 per transaction (capped at USD 25) for its services.
Modern distributors such as DistroKid and ByteDance’s SoundOn are building automatic royalty split algorithms in their solutions. However, Mozaic believes that because of its cross-border competence, its solutions will be adopted well.
The team at Mozaic added that labels and creator houses wanting to be competitive in the space will need to adopt modern solutions to pay artists in a timely manner. Otherwise, they risk losing them. What they’re very excited about is a Chrome extension that allows one to add splits to anything. That Chrome extension will work on YouTube, Etsy, Spotify, and on GitHub. And it’s as easy as tagging friends on the product pages.
While Mozaic has worked with the music industry a lot, it said that the startup’s solution would work well with creators ranging from YouTubers to Twitch streamers and newsletter writers. To make it easier for creators to split payments, the company is launching a Chrome extension and a mobile app in an invite-only mode in January 2024 with plans to make it available to all creators later in Q1 2024.
Mozaic is also working on a website for businesses for better reporting and split revenues or affiliate sales.
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