Kendrick Lamar And Other High Profile Celebrities Invest In MixedByAli’s EngineEars!
Kendrick Lamar And Other High Profile Celebrities Invest In MixedByAli’s EngineEars! EngineEars, a Los Angeles-based music-tech start-up founded by the Grammy Award-winning audio engineer Derek “MixedByAli” Ali, announced Wednesday the completion of their $1 Million Pre-Seed round of investing.
According to Complex, the Investment is being led by Los Angeles based venture capital firm, Slauson & Co., with participation from some of the biggest names in music such as Kendrick Lamar, DJ Khaled, Roddy Ricch, Mustard, YG, Ella Mai, Bas, Smino, Russ, Masego, Cardogotwings, Young Guru, Kenny Beats, Ibrahim Hamad of Dreamville, La Mar Taylor of XO, Meko Yohannes of 10Summers, and indie-record label EQT.
“For too long I’ve witnessed and felt the lack of organisation and structure for the creatives at the forefront of presenting the art to the public,” Ali said in a press release. “Audio engineers exist behind the curtain and are put to the side too often as the independent music industry grows. This is why we raised our pre-seed, to hire the best talent and develop the best platform for music creatives.”
Derek Ali, better known by his moniker MixedByAli, is a Grammy Award-winning mix engineer. His career began in Los Angeles in the late 2000s recording and mixing for Top Dawg Entertainment artists like Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock and SZA. In 2018, he invented an online mixing program and community for mixing engineers called EngineEars which is aimed at teaching upcoming engineers techniques that will improve the quality of mixes they create and provide a world class mixing access to artists remotely.
Though Ali was introduced to mixing DAWs like Pro Tools by Punch and Dave Free, his most notable professional teacher is Dr. Dre whom he served under as an intern. Many people are excited about this venture and have signed up to invest their money into the company during its initial round of funding, hoping it will take off like so many other tech start-ups launching during the pandemic.
