Paris Founders Event alums ‘Where are they Now’: Niland

 

At our PFE spring edition, Niland launched Siilar, one of these most effective music search tool for music professionals. Its big differentiator versus the other music services out there is its technology based on the music signal (”machine listening”) and not on meta data. So, as we mentioned last year, you can look for a song similar to Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” based on its audio signal, its “DNA”, and filter on elements like a female voice instead of a man’s voice.  
With a successful launch under their belts, Niland continues to innovate and is, even, gearing up to bring more, cutting edge innovation to the music intelligence space in the coming months. I caught up with co-founder & CMO Johan Pages for an update.
What happened to you following your pitch at PFE earlier this year?
Following the PFE, we  have worked a lot to find the right marketing positioning for our first product Siilar (standing for ‘Sound Similar’).
Siilar is now commercialized through an API and is the only music search engine solution designed for music catalog owners (Publishers, MarketPlaces and Distributors). With Siilar, all their tracks are correctly tagged and audio example can be used as a seed for a research. They can stop worrying about music indexation, navigation and keep focusing on selling their music. 10 clients now use it (mostly abroad) and we are focusing on the commercial development.
Niland is currently a team of 7 people working hard towards better digital music experience. We have moved from the Agoranov Incubator and are now located in the 20th District of Paris.
How did the PFE help you?
The PFE was really great to gain visibility among the Parisian Startup Scene. We still encounter people that remember seeing us at Google HQ or in the following press coverage. We met a lot of VCs in the aftermath of the event and got a lot of great job applicants.
What is Niland up to at the moment? Any big projects you’re working? New news to share?
We have just raised a seed investment at the end of last year to pursue our business development objectives and continue to invest on R&D.
We are going to SXSW in  March 2015, as part of the French Delegation, selected by UbiFrance and  La FrenchTech. We hope to meet future partners there.
We are also really close to releasing our second product that will be a fully functional Recommendation & Discovery API. Leveraging on the Machine Listening technology we showcased at PFE, we have built a fully integrated solution (with user taste profile, situational trigger, mood-aware playlisting..) to deliver the best “lean-forward” and “lean-back” music experiences. The idea is to get the right song, to right user at the right time.
This service will be available for B2C music platforms & radio, app makers and hardware manufacturers. As you may know, Music Intelligence is one of the  hottest topics in digital streaming services right now due to the recent acquisition of Echonest (by Spotify), directly threatening the security of some of the biggest music services today. We aim at providing a new alternative.