Unit1 Studio raises £20m to copy ABBA Voyage across cities
Balderton has led a £20m round in a London producer that says it can build avatar concerts cheaply enough to run them in several venues at once. No artists have been named yet.
Unit1 Studio has raised €23.3 million, or £20 million, in a mix of equity and production financing.
Balderton Capital led the equity portion, which the company describes as oversubscribed. Existing backers Mercuri, Gilston Music and Paul McGuinness, U2's long-time manager, also took part.
The London company produces avatar concerts: digitally recreated performances by artists who no longer tour. The reference point is ABBA Voyage, which runs in a purpose-built venue in London and nowhere else.
That is the constraint Unit1 says it has removed. On the company's account, its technology makes it possible to run the same production in multiple venues simultaneously, in the way touring theatre is adapted city by city.
It also says it is aiming at shows that recoup their development costs within twelve months. That is a target rather than a result.
The evidence offered so far is a demonstration. Unit1 says it moved its KT Tunstall avatar demo-concert from Brompton Technology's testing facility in Gunnersbury, west London, to a permanent studio at Tileyard London in four days.
Relocation is the expensive part of this format, and four days is the number the whole pitch rests on. It has not been independently verified.
The company is led by founder and chief executive Barney Wragg, previously of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, now LW Entertainment, and before that AEG, EMI and Universal Music Group.
Jonathan Butterell, who directed the West End musical and film Everyone's Talking About Jamie, is creative director. Pavle Mihajlovic, co-founder of the game studios Electric Saint and Flavourworks, is technical director.
Unit1 has also hired avatar creators Greg Meeres Young, whose credits include Planet of the Apes and Lord of the Rings, and Sefki Ibrahim, who worked on ABBA Voyage. John Kennedy, former chairman and chief executive of Universal Music UK and of the IFPI, joins the board as a non-executive director.
The money will fund a slate of concerts in development. The company has not said which artists are involved, and says it will announce them when tickets go on sale.
For founders, the interesting part is the financing structure rather than the avatars. Unit1 raised equity and production finance together, which is how film and theatre are funded and how software companies almost never are.
If a show is a capital project with a twelve-month payback, it can carry debt-like money that would never price against a software roadmap. The test comes when the first multi-city run is booked and someone can count the venues.