Venture Name: Yousician
Venture Description:
Yousician is an interactive and music educational based application that allows users to learn a musical instrument. Currently, the app supports the following instruments: guitar, piano, ukulele, bass, and voice. The app also allows the user to learn skills, techniques, and theory. Furthermore, as you play in the app, you get interactive feedback. To encourage the learner, they also have a library of songs that include interactive lessons. Their mission is to help everyone discover their musical potential with fun music lessons.
Christoph Thür
Christoph Thür is a Co-Founder of Yousician. Christoph currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Yousician. Prior to founding the company, he was a Laser scientist. He has earned degrees in Systems Engineering and Industrial Management. Christoph states that many hesitate to pick up an instrument because traditional music education doesn’t work well for them – I was one of those people.
Mikko Kaipainen
Mikko Kaipainen is a Co-Founder and CSO of Yousician. Mikko met Christoph in university while working together on a project-based simulation course. Mikko and Christoph shared the same experience by failing as young musicians. Mikko has been with the company since 2010. Mikko has a degree in Engineering. Mikko also has an M.Sc. in Industrial Management.
Team:
Currently the company employs approximately 126 employees. The company investors are Silicon Valley venture firm, True Ventures, along with Amazon’s Alexa Fund and MPL Ventures LLP. There are also numerous Angel investors that support this company.
Personal Reflections:
As a music teacher, I am always interested in musical educational technologies that I can use to help, enhance, or improve the way my students learn. As a music teacher, I can agree with them that some traditional methods don’t always work. Students are prone to disengagement and then learning becomes a chore. If a product like this can help influence musical potential, then I can add this to my educational resource library.
Website References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yousician
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/investor/110499-94
https://courses.minnalearn.com/en/courses/startingup/explaining-startups/being-an-entrepreneur/
https://theorg.com/org/yousician/org-chart/mikko-kaipainen
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/mikko-kaipainen
Thank you for sharing this, Jeremiah. As a music teacher myself, I’m always looking for new tech resources to use in my classroom. This is an incredibly useful piece of technology that I would definitely like to implement.
Hello!
Thank you for sharing this. Growing up, I’ve been interested in playing instruments. I played the guitar and trumpet when I was in high school. I do agree that parts of traditional music learning does not work for children and adults a like. I had problems reading music and I found that I needed to hear it and then the musical notations would slowly make sense to me. I’ve come to realize that I’m both a visual and auditory learner, so YouTube videos of how to play certain songs on the guitar helped me a lot.
I often see Yousician being advertised on YouTube. I’ve never tried it and I’m surprised that it’s quite a big company with 126 employees. I think the business has a great market as music education is expensive. I’ve always wanted to take formal lessons as a kid but I knew my parents couldn’t afford it.
I often find that music apps only focus on instruments that are “tactile” in nature like string instruments. In terms of future growth for apps like this in the future, I wonder if they’ll ever offer lessons for the wind instruments. I guess this is a harder program to develop as wind instruments often deal with certain mouth placements like when I played the trumpet the embouchure is essential to be able to produce a sound. That is hard to correct/teach and often needs an instructor to be at the student’s side.