AI-music startup Aiode was one of the winners of our Music Ally SI:X startups contest in 2024, before joining the Abbey Road REDD incubator program. Now it has launched its desktop app after a closed beta – and after securing a $5.5m extension to its seed-funding round. The service provides “virtualised musicians” for human artists and producers to collaborate with, generating stems in response to their work which can then be exported for use in DAWs. Each of the virtualised artists is based on a human who had input into the process: “selecting instruments, genres, and styles for their virtual counterparts”. A revenue-sharing model compensates them for the use of those counterparts, with Aiode’s business model being freemium: a free tier backed up by Basic, Pro and Enterprise paid tiers that include more tokens for music-generation and access to more features.