TDE’s acclaimed engineer MixedByAli launched his EngineEars platform last year in order to transform the way engineers, songwriters and producers run their businesses and get work in the industry.
Today, the 31-year old engineer, real name Derek Ali, has announced the completion of a $1 Million pre-seed round of investing. And there are some recognizable names who have shown faith in the concept.
They include: Kendrick Lamar, Roddy Ricch, Russ, Mustard, DJ Khaled, YG, Ella Mai, Bas, Smino, Masego, Cardogotwings, Young Guru, Kenny Beats, Ibrahim Hamad of Dreamville, La Mar Taylor of XO, Meko Yohannes of 10Summers, and indie-record label EQT. The investments are led by Slauson & Co., founded by Austin Clements and Ajay Relan.
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“For over two years I’ve been taking my time really understanding the real problems in my industry. From all of this research, what I/ve realized is that the problem is there are minimal tools provided to audio engineers to set us up for success, and very little access for artist and labels to search and instantly book talented engineers for their projects. This is why we created the solution EngineEars,” said Ali in a statement.
“From acquiring clients and scheduling new projects, managing file storage and project archiving, to tracking payments, EngineEars provides audio engineers with the tools to operate their business whilst democratizing access to high quality engineering for artists globally,” he added. “Audio engineers exist behind the curtain and are put to the side too often as the independent music industry grows. This is why we raised our pre-seed, to hire the best talent and develop the best platform for music creatives.”
EngineEars’ senior management team is madde of COO Dan Maynard (Co-founder of the Canadian Apparel Company, Noble Gentlemen Trading), CTO Luke Sorenson (former Senior Software Engineer at Google), and Market Advisor Jacob Shamberge.
