GasLab raises $1M pre-seed to build a generative music platform that pays the artists it learns from

GasLab (Amsterdam) has raised a $1 million (approx. €920,000) pre-seed round. Investors include Eric Demuth (co-founder and executive Chairman of Bitpanda), Bas Beerens (founder of WeTransfer), and other European entrepreneurs. The company was co-founded by Reinier Zonneveld, Cas Luuring, and Thijs Emondts.

The platform and the attribution problem

GasLab is building a generative AI music platform with a specific technical ambition: to compensate artists whose music contributed to training the model, on every track generated. The mechanism is a proprietary system called the Digital Notary — a record that identifies which artists and rights holders (on both the master and publishing side) shaped a generated track and allocates revenue accordingly.

The company is still in private testing. Users can join a waitlist for early access ahead of a public launch.

The founders and their background

Reinier Zonneveld is a Dutch techno DJ and classical pianist, known for holding a world record for the longest electronic live set. He and Cas Luuring began working with machine learning in music eight years ago, leading to R² — an AI model trained exclusively on Zonneveld's own library that served as an AI counterpart for live performances. That project, now succeeded by GasLab, gave the founding team direct experience with the technical and rights challenges of generative music before they started raising capital.

Thijs Emondts, the third co-founder, brings background from venture capital and as a general manager at Uber.

Why the Digital Notary matters

The music industry's relationship with generative AI is adversarial: most major platforms are either in litigation with rights holders or operating under temporary blanket licensing arrangements. GasLab's premise is that neither approach produces a sustainable creative ecosystem, and that an attribution infrastructure — one that could eventually be licensed to other generative music platforms — is the more durable solution.

The $1M pre-seed is the starting capital for building that infrastructure. It is explicitly a proof-of-concept round, not a commercialisation budget.