Echo Nest Launches Musical Brain, Raises Capital

Wade Roush9/10/08

Somerville, MA-based Echo Nest, a startup focused on Web-based software for music search, personalization, and interactivity, made its public debut Monday at the Demo Fall 08 conference in San Diego. The company’s “Musical Brain” software, developed by MIT Media Lab graduates and company co-founders Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan, automatically “listens” to and classifies digitally-stored music and attempts to understand music behavior and predict new music trends. Outside developers can access the Musical Brain through a variety of application programming interfaces. The company also announced Monday that it has closed its first venture financing round. But the size of the round, which was led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures of Waltham, MA, was not disclosed.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.