LONDON (CelebrityAccess) – TikTok parent company, Bytedance has reportedly acquired Jukedeck, a UK-based AI Music startup which specializes in creating royalty-free music for user-generated online videos.
Jukedeck has raised $2.5m to date from investors such as Cambridge Innovation Capital, Parkwalk Advisors, Backed VC and Playfair Capital.
The news, first reported by Music Ally, was given away by the fact that many of JukeDeck’s senior management team had switched their employer details on LinkedIn.
This includes Jukedeck Founder and CEO Ed Newton-Rex, who has been working for Bytedance as director of its AI Lab since April of this year; David Trevelyan and Pierre Chanquion (previously senior software engineers, music production R&D at Jukedeck; now senior software engineers at Bytedance’s AI Lab); Katerina Kosta and Gabriele Medeot (formerly machine learning researchers at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researchers at Bytedance); and Marco Selvi (formerly senior software engineer and machine learning researcher at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researcher at Bytedance).
Also, Jukedeck’s site is now offline and its homepage has been replaced by a message saying, “We can’t tell you more just yet, but we’re looking forward to continuing to fuel creativity using musical AI!”
The social music app has been downloaded about 80 million times in the United States, and 800 million times worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower. Meanwhile, Tiktok hit one billion global app downloads in February, with nearly 100m in the USA and 250m in India.
