Khush Lands Funding To Help Wannabe Singers Create Music On The Go

Khush, a startup that develops music applications, has raised a new round of funding from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, angel investor Yee Lee, and Georgia Tech ATDC VentureLab. The startup declined to reveal how much money was raised in the round.

Co-founded by Prerna Gupta (you can read her recent TechCrunch guest post here), Khush develops an artificial intelligence technology that helps people make music. The company’s first product LaDiDa, which costs $2.99 on the App Store, is essentially a “reverse karaoke” iOS app. Similar to TechCrunch Disruprt finalist Ujam, LaDiDa allows users to sing a song and then will remix the users’s voice, add beats, and background music to create a professional sounding track.

LaDiDa’s demonstration videos have received over 65 million views on YouTube, and the app has been in the Top 10 Paid Music Apps list in iTunes since May 2010. Over 5 million songs have been created in less than one year on the App Store and LaDiDa has been downloaded 270,000 times since last May. And Gupta says that the company is now profitable.

Gupta says that LaDiDa is hoping to differentiate itself as more of an entertainment product as opposed to a music production software. And the app’s key userbase is focused on the 13-17 year old market. Gupta adds that the funding will be used towards product development, with the startup planning to launch new apps in the next few months.