Kobalt Founder Willard Ahdritz Launches $20M Music Tech Fund
Willard Ahdritz, the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Kobalt Music Group, has launched a $20 million fund to back music and media technology companies.
The fund is called Ahdritz Capital Partners. Its launch was reported by Billboard on 1 October.
The move follows his exit from Kobalt. Ahdritz stepped down as chairman after the company was sold to Primary Wave in July. He had built Kobalt into a major independent publisher and rights administrator after founding it in 2000, according to Variety. He gave up the chief executive role in 2020, when Laurent Hubert took over and Ahdritz became chairman, Music Business Worldwide reported at the time.
Ahdritz is not investing alone. Isabel Keulen has been named investment partner at the new firm.
Keulen was previously chief executive of SSE Business Lab, the startup incubator attached to the Stockholm School of Economics, and of its early-stage venture capital fund SSE Ventures. An incubator helps new companies get started. A venture capital fund pools money to back young businesses in exchange for a stake. Before that, she was a principal at Spintop Ventures, where she backed early-stage technology companies.
Stephen Langer has also joined the team. He arrived in May from Lazard's Media, Entertainment & Sports group, where he helped build the bank's music mergers and acquisitions practice. That is the business of advising on the buying and selling of companies and catalogues.
The fund has already started writing cheques. Ahdritz Capital Partners has invested in nine companies: Madverse Music Group, Even, Fever, Soundtrack, un:hurd music, Telly, Sweet, SCOR and Airspot.
One of those bets was signposted earlier. In June, Music Business Worldwide reported that Ahdritz had agreed to lead a funding round in Madverse Music Group, which is headquartered in New Delhi.
What makes this stand out is the shift in role. Ahdritz spent more than two decades running a company that collected royalties and administered rights for songwriters. Now he is sitting on the other side of the table, funding the tools that distribute music, connect artists with fans and manage rights.
