ABBA’s Aggie spends money, money, money in AI-powered record company’s $6m funding round

Snafu Records, the Swedish record company that uses AI to discover new artists, has closed a $6m funding round – with ABBA member Agnetha Fältskog among new investors.

Pophouse Ventures led the round.

The record label said it would use the funds to refine its talent-identifying algorithm – which analyzes new music across platforms like YouTube and Spotify to find potential artists to sign.

Snafu said its algorithm is "able to repeatedly predict the artists most likely to show rapid and explosive follower growth in the future."

“Snafu is focused on using technology as well as our incredible creative team to enable the superstars of tomorrow,” said Ankit Desai, Snafu’s founder and CEO.

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Snafu was founded by Desai in 2019. The company closed a $2.9m seed round last February, which was led by TrueSight Ventures.

As part of that previous round, Per Sundin, who signed Avicii and Tove Lo as the CEO of UMG Universal Music Group Nordics, joined the company’s shareholders.

Snafu has already signed 45 artists to its platform, including multiple Grammy winner Hit-Boy and Grammy nominees NEVADA and Kosine.

Alongside its funding announcement, the record label also unveiled two new platforms – Blurry and Fine.Art (Finance for Artists).

Blurry is a songwriting collaboration platform, while Fine.Art is a peer-to-peer financing program for breakout artists. Both are set to launch in the fall.

“Both Blurry and Fine Art will make it easier for up-and-coming artists to achieve these goals by connecting songwriters with musicians and providing artist advances,” Desai said.

“I’m excited to roll out these tools that leverage Snafu’s music discovery algorithms to help undiscovered talent make an impact in the music industry, and get compensated fairly in the process.”

Investment from ABBA’s Agnetha comes a few weeks before the iconic band is set to make a hotly anticipated comeback.

Forty years after the band split, the Swedish pop quartet has reunited to launch a new album, dubbed Voyage, out in November. They’re also conducting a new concert experience in London, where digital versions of themselves will appear nightly alongside a 10-piece live band.