US royalty platform raises $5m to help artists recover lost royalties

26 Feb 2026 - 11:35

Published under the Creative Commons Licence

Mogul, a music royalty tracking platform founded by former SoundCloud executives Jeff Ponchick and Joey Mason, has secured $5 million in a new funding round led by the Yamaha Music Innovations Fund. The company says it has helped artists recover more than $1.5 billion in lost royalties since its launch last year.

Mogul co-founder Jeff Ponchick.

The round also saw participation from the Urban Innovation Fund, Mindset Ventures, and Fairway Capital Partners, alongside existing investors Amplify L.A. and Wonder Ventures. Mogul has now raised a total of over $6.3 million.

“A universal source of truth for music royalties has long been the industry’s holy grail,” Ponchick said. “Instead of forcing a top-down solution, trying to wrangle labels, publishers, CMOs, and others, Mogul starts at the data itself by bringing together the fragmented metadata that determines payouts and turning it into a clear, actionable view of an artist’s income, with tools to surface and resolve issues fast.”

Since its debut, Mogul has evolved from simply providing lists of recommendations to offering more actionable insights. The platform now presents information in improved formats and includes cross-platform corrections.

“For example, SoundExchange is an entity that collects royalties for digital performance for when your music gets played on SiriusXM,” Ponchick told TechCrunch. “If your SoundExchange is linked, we can identify missing songs and even complete registrations on behalf of the user. There’s a bulk registration option as well.” He added that artists have seen an average 20% increase in royalty revenues through the platform.

Andrew Kahn, Managing Partner at Yamaha, said Mogul “is addressing one of the largest structural inefficiencies in the creator economy: fragmented data across royalties, revenues, and payments. By aggregating hundreds of sources into a unified platform, they’re shrinking the tech stack for creators while unlocking faster, more accurate compensation.”

Mogul recently introduced a catalog valuation tool to estimate an artist’s catalog value across both recording and publishing. The company is also considering how to handle AI-generated music, although Ponchick noted that fully AI-generated tracks “might face scrutiny on certain platforms.”

Currently, Mogul employs six people and plans to expand its team using the new funds.

Click here for more information about Mogul.

Mogul