An Atlanta-based startup that combines music publishing with blockchain technology won the 20th Rice Business Plan Competition, a three-day event that was postponed and held virtually this week due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Aurign, a startup out of Georgia State University, won a $350,000 investment, which could increase as it works with Goose Capital, a Texas investment firm. It was one of seven finalists that competed Friday.
Aurign develops plug-ins for popular music-recording software to create a record of a song as it’s being recorded. When the song is completed, its technology creates a publishing contract for each of the artists involved. The data from the work is stored securely on a blockchain application, a type of secure digital ledger.
PIVOTING: Rice Business Plan Competition goes virtual
Friday’s finals featured seven teams from universities from around the globe that were winnowed down from 42 in a preliminary round held Thursday. None of the Texas teams - from Rice, Texas State University and the University of Texas at Arlington - made it to the finals.
The competition began Wednesday with so-called “elevator pitches” - 60-second videos in which the teams could present the concept for their startups. That session was public, but the initial round, featuring longer pitches presented live, was open only to participants and judges.
During Friday’s event, finalists had 10 minutes for their pitches, crafted as though they were talking to investors. The judges then submitted questions in writing via a chat window to the teams.
The judges were told to rank the startups based on whether they would invest in them.
Moderators and hosts at the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship appeared on-camera, but everyone else logged in remotely. Technically, the event appeared to come off without a hitch.
Prizes in cash and startup investments totaled $1.1 million, according to the competition’s website, which is significantly less than the $2.9 million offered in 2019. The 2020 tally could grow if the investors decide they want to take bigger stakes in the winners.
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The top prize of $350,000 came in the form of an investment from Goose Capital, an early stage investment firm made up of serial entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 executives.
Robert Hatcher, the CEO of Aurign (pronounced “orion”), said the idea grew out of collaborating on music with his brother, who lived elsewhere. They traded emails with the song’s changes attached back and forth, which took weeks.
“It started out as a collaboration application,” Hatcher said in a phone interview. “I said to him, ‘What if we created a collaboration platform so we could work in real time.”
That eventually morphed into the current product, as Hatcher and his partners realized that, in the streaming era, musicians were collaborating, then uploading music to services like Spotify without real documentation as to who did what on a song.
“If you upload your music without registering for publication first, you can’t verify your ownership,” Hatcher said during his presentation to judges Friday.
Aurign, originally called SoundCollide, has already drawn some important investors: The startup was accepted into a Comcast accelerator in Atlanta, and the cable and video content giant has taken a stake.
It also recently won first place and $50,000 at the Heartland Challenge Business Competition in Arkansas.
Other finalists at the business plan competition included:
Second place: Nanopathdx from Dartmouth University, with technology for rapidly diagnosing the novel coronavirus.
Third place: Fractal from Harvard University, whose product allows creators of high-resolution digital content, such as animation, to connect remotely to powerful graphical workstations.
Fourth place: RefresherBoxx from RWTH Aachen University in Germany, with technology that uses UV light, heat, air pressure and ozone to sterilize and clean garments and protective equipment without liquids.
Fifth place: Beltech from the University of Chicago, which has improved the longevity and safety of lithium-ion batteries while reducing their cost.
Sixth place: Cardiosense from Northwestern University, which has developed a non-invasive sensor for monitoring sophisticated heart health information.
Seventh place: Relavo from Johns Hopkins University, with a device that prevents infections in dialysis patients.
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June 19, 2020 at 12:00PM
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