The fintech firm’s CEO believes a faster and more transparent royalty process will “help all facets of the industry earn more money.”
Hjelmstedt is a Swedish serial entrepreneur known for founding gaming platform Electronic Sports Network, which Electronic Arts acquired in 2012, and co-founding video-on-demand platform Voddler, which filed for bankruptcy in 2018. He co-founded Utopia in 2016 with, basing it in the town of Zug, where around 60 of the company’s staff of 1,000 are based.
Details about Utopia’s finances and funding remain opaque. The company’s only publicly listed investors are Switzerland-based investment firms CV VC and FiveT Fintech . Hjelmstedt says the firms “are by far not among the largest investors” but declined to reveal any others. Utopia, which he says generates over 100 million euros in revenue a year, recently completed an investment round, but Hjelmstedt declined to discuss figures or what the capital will be used for.
Utopia’s royalty platform arm, which Hjelmstedt oversees, looks after the company’s financial technology services, data operations, copyright and royalty processing. Hjelmstedt declines to comment on whether dividing Utopia into two separate divisions signals an intention to make the split between distributor and royalty platform permanent. He rejects speculation that Utopia is a tech scale-up looking to capitalize on the growth of the music industry rather than to build a sustainable business. The company’s myriad acquisitions, he says, were made “to understand different parts of the industry better, so we can serve them better with the data.
“We will never be a collecting society or a [performing rights organization],” says Hjelmstedt. “We will never sell data and we will not take investments from a large strategic player in the industry, and by doing so, we can safeguard the core of what we stand for.”
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