The Man Who Sold His Messaging App To Skype Just Raised $4.5 Million For His New Music Startup

After selling messaging app GroupMe to Skype for $85 million in 2011, Steve Martocci did not sit still. Within two years he had his next startup, a music platform called Splice, in the works.

Splice is a cloud-based platform for music creation that helps artists save, share, collaborate, and remix music by working alongside professional music creation tools like Ableton Live, FL Studio, and Logic X.

It lets you look at the revisions you make in case you want to look at other versions of your song. It's sort of like Apple's GarageBand for professionals, paired with the social network aspect of being able to share your creations with other artists for their input and remixing.

Last October, Splice raised $2.75 million in a seed round, and on Wednesday the startup announced a new round of funds - a $4.5 million Series A round led by True Ventures with participation from Scooter Braun, Tiësto, Steve Angello, AM Only, WME, Plus Eight Equity Fund LP, plus some repeat investors from its seed round such as Union Square Ventures.

At the same time, Splice is moving into open beta and rolling out a new product called DNA Player along with a new track from artists Henry Fong and J-Trick.

The DNA Player lets you see how a song was built while listening to it. It lets you look at all of the nitty gritty components that go into the song with annotations explaining each piece, and it helps artists visualize music's source code.

"We built a platform that allows musicians to focus solely on the creative process without interruption and are excited to open up the beta to all musicians today," Martocci said in a press release. "We're thrilled to see music veterans alongside up and coming artists work with us in different capacities to bring the industry up to speed with technology."