Bengaluru-based AI music startup Beatoven.ai has discontinued its business-to-consumer (B2C) service and absorbed its core team into media company Rusk Media, co-founder Mansoor Rahimat Khan announced in a LinkedIn post.
The company will retain ownership of its core intellectual property and is now exploring licensing its Maestro AI model and music-intelligence technology to businesses.
“Last month, we officially discontinued Beatoven.ai’s B2C service,” Khan said, marking the end of the startup’s six-year run as a consumer AI music product.
The company’s core team has joined Rusk Media, where it will continue working on generative media, according to Khan. Beatoven will retain the intellectual property behind its Maestro model, while the company is “actively licensing” the model for commercial and enterprise use cases, particularly in music intelligence.
Beatoven.ai was founded in 2021 by Khan and Siddharth Bhardwaj. It developed AI tools that generate royalty-free background music for videos, podcasts, and other content. The company says more than 2 million creators have generated over 15 million tracks using its platform.
The startup had raised $1.3 million in a pre-Series A round in March 2024, led by Capital 2B, with participation from Entrepreneur First, IvyCap Ventures, Upsparks Capital, Rukam Capital, and angel investors. At the time, Beatoven.ai said more than 1 million users were using its platform and that 96% of its revenue came from markets outside India.
The company’s shift comes as competition in generative music has intensified. Khan said Beatoven.ai’s decision to license music and build its foundation models from scratch created challenges as competitors with greater funding adopted models trained using scraped data.
“Our original approach of ethically licensing music and building foundational models from scratch faced strong headwinds as heavily funded competitors emerged, building models through data scraping,” Khan said.
Beatoven.ai had positioned Maestro around licensed training data and artist compensation. In 2025, the company said it trained the model through licensing agreements with rights holders and would support royalty payments to artists and composers whose work contributed to the model.
The company had also received Fairly Trained certification for its AI music generator, reflecting its use of licensed music for model training. Its website says musicians receive compensation when they contribute music to Beatoven.ai.
Reflecting on the company's consumer business, Khan identified user retention as a key challenge for AI products aimed at creators. “Prosumer Content Creation is Tough: Retention is your primary nightmare and number one priority,” he said.
He also pointed to the difficulty of securing music rights, describing licensing as “extremely hard” because of fragmented players and gatekeepers.
Beatoven.ai is now seeking commercial partners for its technology. Khan said the company is in “active conversations for technology licensing” and invited organisations interested in its Maestro model, music intelligence, or underlying technology to contact him.
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