Sector:
Musictech/AI
Country:
Sweden
Year
2023
Short Description
Whether you are an artist, a label, or a distributor; Snafu provides growth capital and marketing/creative services to artists, labels, and distributors to help maximise the value of your music catalog.
Founders
Ankit Desai
,
Founder & CEO
Why we invested
SNAFU fits our belief that the creator economy needs better financial incentives, not more extraction. Artists with proven demand should not have to give up ownership to fund growth necessarily. By underwriting streaming revenues and pairing capital with hands-on support SNAFU enables creators to stay independent while scaling globally. On top of our love for music, this is exactly the kind of founder-aligned, cash-flow-driven fintech/musictech we want to back early!
Founder Story
Ankit Desai
,
Founder & CEO
Ankit grew up in India as an only child who wanted to build things of his own. At the University of Georgia, he studied marketing while trying side projects with friends: a dating app where friends would “vouch” for you, a drone farming idea in India that ran into customs law, a big data consultancy that crashed a computer when a 50GB telecom file was opened in Excel. None of them worked, but they set his default toward experimentation and ownership.
A summer job at Universal Music in Stockholm, after a master’s at the Stockholm School of Economics, was meant to be a last “fun job” before something more serious. Instead, it hooked him. He watched songs go from an idea in a room to part of people’s lives within hours and ran global marketing for artists like Avicii and Swedish acts.
Inside a major label, he saw the numbers: three companies controlled most of global listening but were behind less than 1% of new releases. The system simply wasn’t built for almost all working artists.
SNAFU is his response. Rather than chase the next superstar, Ankit built a platform that uses data to find overlooked artists with stable, repeatable listening patterns and gives them financing and services without taking their masters. He believes artists should be entrepreneurs who can borrow against their future earnings and assemble the stack of support they need. Today, SNAFU tracks millions of artists and partners with hundreds across 47 countries and over 20 Grammy nominations between them, to help them run their own careers as real, durable businesses.
Ankit grew up in India as an only child who wanted to build things of his own. At the University of Georgia, he studied marketing while trying side projects with friends: a dating app where friends would “vouch” for you, a drone farming idea in India that ran into customs law, a big data consultancy that crashed a computer when a 50GB telecom file was opened in Excel. None of them worked, but they set his default toward experimentation and ownership.
A summer job at Universal Music in Stockholm, after a master’s at the Stockholm School of Economics, was meant to be a last “fun job” before something more serious. Instead, it hooked him. He watched songs go from an idea in a room to part of people’s lives within hours and ran global marketing for artists like Avicii and Swedish acts.
Inside a major label, he saw the numbers: three companies controlled most of global listening but were behind less than 1% of new releases. The system simply wasn’t built for almost all working artists.
SNAFU is his response. Rather than chase the next superstar, Ankit built a platform that uses data to find overlooked artists with stable, repeatable listening patterns and gives them financing and services without taking their masters. He believes artists should be entrepreneurs who can borrow against their future earnings and assemble the stack of support they need. Today, SNAFU tracks millions of artists and partners with hundreds across 47 countries and over 20 Grammy nominations between them, to help them run their own careers as real, durable businesses.
Sector:
Musictech/AI
Country:
Sweden
Year
2023
Short Description
Whether you are an artist, a label, or a distributor; Snafu provides growth capital and marketing/creative services to artists, labels, and distributors to help maximise the value of your music catalog.
Founders
Ankit Desai
,
Founder & CEO
Why we invested
SNAFU fits our belief that the creator economy needs better financial incentives, not more extraction. Artists with proven demand should not have to give up ownership to fund growth necessarily. By underwriting streaming revenues and pairing capital with hands-on support SNAFU enables creators to stay independent while scaling globally. On top of our love for music, this is exactly the kind of founder-aligned, cash-flow-driven fintech/musictech we want to back early!
Founder Story
Ankit Desai
,
Founder & CEO
Ankit grew up in India as an only child who wanted to build things of his own. At the University of Georgia, he studied marketing while trying side projects with friends: a dating app where friends would “vouch” for you, a drone farming idea in India that ran into customs law, a big data consultancy that crashed a computer when a 50GB telecom file was opened in Excel. None of them worked, but they set his default toward experimentation and ownership.
A summer job at Universal Music in Stockholm, after a master’s at the Stockholm School of Economics, was meant to be a last “fun job” before something more serious. Instead, it hooked him. He watched songs go from an idea in a room to part of people’s lives within hours and ran global marketing for artists like Avicii and Swedish acts.
Inside a major label, he saw the numbers: three companies controlled most of global listening but were behind less than 1% of new releases. The system simply wasn’t built for almost all working artists.
SNAFU is his response. Rather than chase the next superstar, Ankit built a platform that uses data to find overlooked artists with stable, repeatable listening patterns and gives them financing and services without taking their masters. He believes artists should be entrepreneurs who can borrow against their future earnings and assemble the stack of support they need. Today, SNAFU tracks millions of artists and partners with hundreds across 47 countries and over 20 Grammy nominations between them, to help them run their own careers as real, durable businesses.
Ankit grew up in India as an only child who wanted to build things of his own. At the University of Georgia, he studied marketing while trying side projects with friends: a dating app where friends would “vouch” for you, a drone farming idea in India that ran into customs law, a big data consultancy that crashed a computer when a 50GB telecom file was opened in Excel. None of them worked, but they set his default toward experimentation and ownership.
A summer job at Universal Music in Stockholm, after a master’s at the Stockholm School of Economics, was meant to be a last “fun job” before something more serious. Instead, it hooked him. He watched songs go from an idea in a room to part of people’s lives within hours and ran global marketing for artists like Avicii and Swedish acts.
Inside a major label, he saw the numbers: three companies controlled most of global listening but were behind less than 1% of new releases. The system simply wasn’t built for almost all working artists.
SNAFU is his response. Rather than chase the next superstar, Ankit built a platform that uses data to find overlooked artists with stable, repeatable listening patterns and gives them financing and services without taking their masters. He believes artists should be entrepreneurs who can borrow against their future earnings and assemble the stack of support they need. Today, SNAFU tracks millions of artists and partners with hundreds across 47 countries and over 20 Grammy nominations between them, to help them run their own careers as real, durable businesses.