Music Tectonics has crowned the winners of this year’s Swimming with Narwhals startup pitch competition. Resolut, an automated platform designed to resolve royalty conflicts at scale, secured the Jury Award, while Visuals.fm, a platform that instantly generates custom visuals and videos for music, took home the Audience Choice award.
The competition took place at Music Tectonics’ eighth annual gathering, which saw its highest attendance to date. The conference brought together music and music tech founders, investors, and executives under the theme "The Rising Tide," highlighting tech solutions that expand value across the industry rather than disrupt it.
The Winning Startups
- Resolut (Jury Award Winner): Built to tackle one of the most persistent bottlenecks in music publishing and distribution, Resolut automates royalty dispute resolution at scale. The startup pitched before a panel of investor judges consisting of Andrew Kahn (Yamaha Music Innovation Fund), Ishan Sachdev (Deciens Capital), and Joe Tou (Triptyq Capital), who evaluated finalists on business model viability and total market reach.
- Visuals.fm (Audience Choice Winner): Selected by a live vote of Music Tectonics conference attendees, Visuals.fm streamlines creative workflows by automating instant video and visual generation tailored to music releases.
Finalists Tackling Infrastructure and Ticketing
The two other finalists in this year’s Narwhal cohort addressed critical friction points across live events and release workflows:
- EquitX: Developed a fairer pricing structure for high-demand concert and event ticketing.
- Cadence IO: Provides a unified data entry point to organize, deliver, and track releases across the supply chain.
Tech as an Engine for Growth, Not Disruption
"All of our Narwhal finalists reflect how technology can address real pain points in our business and lead to greater revenue, efficiency, and capacity for creativity," said Dmitri Vietze, Founder of Music Tectonics. He continued:
"This approach perfectly fits our conference theme of growing music together. We're thrilled to be able to support and encourage the people making genuine change that will let music thrive as an artform and an industry."
Setting the tone for the event, Hipgnosis Artist Partnerships founder Merck Mercuriadis led a fireside chat on realigning music’s cultural and monetary value. Throughout the programming, discussions focused on closing royalty collection gaps, deploying pragmatic AI workflows, and unlocking emerging monetization channels such as gaming and virtual environments.
The conference drew broad backing across the ecosystem, with Supernova sponsors including Artist Growth, AWS, LyricFind, Morrison Foerster, ONErpm, Rock Paper Scissors, Vocana, and Yamaha Music Innovations Fund.
Hypebot's Bottom Line
Resolut and Visuals.fm, the 2026 Swimming with Narwhals startup pitch contest winners at the record-setting Music Tectonics conference, confirm a noticeable shift in music tech startups and investments: flashy "disruptors" are taking a back seat to high-utility infrastructure.
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