DJ Reinier Zonneveld launches AI music startup GasLab with $1M pre-seed funding
Tech.eu Cate Lawrence
Reinier Zonneveld’s GasLab launched with $1 million to make AI music pay artists. It tracks which songs shaped each output and shares revenue back with rights holders.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, Cate Lawrence — read the original for the full story.
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DJ and producer Reinier Zonneveld has launched GasLab, short for Generative AI Solutions Lab, with $1 million in pre-seed funding. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a flyer, but the problem it’s aimed at is messy: generative AI can now spit out a finished track in seconds, while the musicians whose work influenced that output often get nothing back.
GasLab wants to change that. Artists and labels that opt in can let their music be used to train the model, then see exactly how their catalogue influenced each generated track. The company says its Digital Notary system creates an attribution record at both master and publishing level, gives every track a permanent ID and watermark, and ties an economic right to the artists credited on the result.
That matters because GasLab is not just talking about recognition. It is building a revenue-sharing system around the record of who contributed what, so if an AI-generated track takes off, the original rights holders are supposed to share in the upside. GasLab says the same record can underpin payments from subscriptions or releases. In other words, it is trying to make attribution do real financial work instead of acting like a polite footnote.
The backers include Eric Demuth, co-founder and executive chairman of Bitpanda, and Bas Beerens, founder of WeTransfer, plus other European entrepreneurs. Zonneveld is hardly starting from zero either: he trained as a classical pianist from the age of three, later taught himself electronic production, launched the Filth on Acid label in 2017, and says he has been working with machine learning for eight years with his long-time friend and business partner Cas Luuring.
He also built his own AI model, R2, from his own catalogue and has been playing it back-to-back against sets at festivals. GasLab’s core team also includes former VC partner and Uber general manager Thijs Emondts. The company says the funding will carry it into its next phase as it aims to become a global GenAI music platform that is both transparent and fairly attributed, with private testing invites now open before a later public launch.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the rare AI-music pitch that at least starts with the right problem: pay the people whose work feeds the machine. The industry has spent too long acting like attribution is a moral nice-to-have instead of the whole business model. GasLab is basically saying the only decent AI music platform is one that keeps a paper trail and a cheque attached to it.
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