Music royalty platform Mogul tracks $1.5B in royalties, secures $5M in fresh funding

Music rights and royalty payouts can be confusing and time-consuming to manage. There are several royalty types, and artists often need to keep their information up to date across multiple services to avoid missing payments. For many creators, pulling everything together in one place while still staying focused on making music becomes an exhausting, ongoing chore.

Mogul, a royalty and music-rights platform founded by former SoundCloud head of creators Jeff Ponchick and former SoundCloud VP of engineering Joey Mason, announced Tuesday that it has helped artists identify and track $1.5 billion in unclaimed or “lost” royalties since launching last year.

Alongside that milestone, the startup disclosed it has raised $5 million in a new funding round led by the Yamaha Music Innovations Fund. The round also included participation from the Urban Innovation Fund, Mindset Ventures, and Fairway Capital Partners, as well as returning investors Amplify LA and Wonder Ventures. In total, Mogul says it has now raised more than $6.3 million to date.

Mogul currently employs a team of six and plans to expand headcount using the new capital.

Andrew Kahn, managing partner at Yamaha Music Innovations Fund, said the company’s founding team has the background and product experience needed to build tools that genuinely support artists in managing their careers. He also pointed to Mogul’s data approach as a key differentiator.

“We believe that Mogul has built the most comprehensive, first-party data pipeline that exists for residual income earners,” Kahn said over email. “Most companies that we have looked into in this space purport to have robust coverage when, in actuality, they have limited connectivity to payers. This means that Mogul can be trusted for both accuracy and speed.”

Since debuting last year, Mogul’s platform has expanded beyond simply providing users with a list of recommended actions to improve catalogue organisation. The product now offers more practical, direct guidance, including improved list formats and, in some cases, cross-platform fixes to catalogue metadata and registration details.

Ponchick shared a real-world example involving SoundExchange, which collects digital performance royalties when music is played on services such as SiriusXM.

“For example, Sound Exchange is an entity that collects royalties for digital performance for when your music gets played on SiriusXM,” Ponchick said. “If your SoundExchange is linked, we’ll say, hey, we see you distributed these songs through DistroKid to Spotify; half of them are not in your SoundExchange account.”

He added that when Mogul identifies missing information, the platform can prompt the user for details and then help complete the registration process. The company has also introduced a bulk registration feature that allows uploading and adding data to a source at scale. According to Ponchick, Mogul users have seen an average 20% increase in royalty revenue after using the platform.

In addition to royalty tracking and catalogue fixes, Mogul has rolled out a catalogue valuation tool that estimates an artist’s catalogue value across both recording and publishing rights. The tool breaks valuations down by individual tracks and by revenue streams from platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. Ponchick said the broader goal is to help artists better manage their catalogue and maximise its earning potential.

Mogul previously offered a free tier, but Ponchick said it became unrealistic to support automation tools at that level. He noted that many musicians who were early in their careers or not generating meaningful royalty income were using the free version, and that, over time, the platform proved not to be valuable to them. As a result, Mogul eliminated its free tiers to focus on delivering more value to working artists.

The company is also weighing how it will handle the growing complexity of AI-generated music for royalty tracking. Ponchick said performing rights organisations currently allow the registration of music partially created with AI, but music that is fully AI-generated may face additional scrutiny on some platforms. Kahn added that tracking AI music brings new layers of difficulty, including sheer volume, unclear ownership, and disputes over attribution.

“The current infrastructure was built for a human creator ecosystem. High volume, probabilistic authorship could make tracking, allocating, and defending claims to IP and royalties more difficult,” he said.

For now, Mogul is watching how regulations and industry rules evolve. Ponchick said that, despite the uncertainty, Mogul believes it is well-positioned to track royalties for any track, regardless of how it is created.

Mogul operates in a competitive space alongside platforms such as Notes.fm and Claimity. Meanwhile, structural changes are also underway in the U.S. royalty ecosystem. In 2024, the U.S. performing rights organisation AllTrack launched a new division to enable creators to collect performance and mechanical royalties in one place.