Chief executive of the company, Gregory Kris, says the angel investors, which have not been named, are from the financial and media industries and will assist Decibel as it pursues growth internationally, particularly in the US and Asia. Financial details have not been disclosed, but the company has confirmed the angel funding is a six-figure amount.

Evan Stein founded Decibel, an expanded music metadata service, early last year. The London-based company provides structured databases and delivery systems for rich information on music to digital music industry companies.

An ethnomusicologist and computer scientist with a background in linguistics, Stein previously worked at the Library of Congress, the US security industry and was the head of application development at Standard & Poors before launching Decibel.

The technology used by the company has been in development for the past six years, namely in the financial services sector and in criminal intelligence gathering.

Kris says the investment will be used for the further development of client services, metadata application programming interfaces (APIs) and music discovery applications.

He adds, ‘This extra round of investment received will go a long way to ensuring that our metadata products are able to reach as many services and business as possible through the provision of simple, sophisticated metadata APIs within the next six months.

‘The investment received will also be used to develop Decibel’s budding international business. We have established a beachhead in the USA with a small number of significant clients, and a new team of data acquisition experts and sales people. Our data is already multi-lingual, so we intend to land our first Korean and Japanese clients over the next 12 months.’