PORTFOLIO COMPANY
Pirate
A business offering easy-access, affordable, self-service music studios to artists across the globe – an ideal fusion of tech and creativity
- Pirate leases, owns and operates 737 studios around the world
- It is the world’s leading provider of rehearsal and recording facilities
- It provides 24/7 rehearsal, DJ, recording, podcast and dance studios
- Many studios offer “automated recording” handled by cloud software
- Pirate is building a community of artists, connecting them on and offline
The inside story
Pirate began in 2015 in an abandoned police station in Bristol where co-founders David Borrie and Mikey Hammerton along with their friend Fred Wyatt built a rehearsal studio which they offered to bands on an hourly basis at affordable rates.
When this met with success, they saw the potential of scaling up the idea dramatically and offering cost-effective, acoustically insulated, self-service music studios which could be rented out to artists in London, New York and Berlin. By 2018, the company was operating 350 studios in 21 locations and was running talent competitions to showcase musicians and DJs.
Why we chose to invest and how it added value
In March 2022, Edge invested in Pirate, which by now had a community of 250,000 artists and had passed 1m bookings. We saw in Pirate’s vision to make music creation significantly more socially accessible and to connect creators to each other both online and offline, a business model we believed in and one which aligned with our desire to increase social mobility.
We believe our investment can help them scale the business further and offer more innovative digital tools.
Tell us what you are building
Edge supports founders from all parts of the creative economy. If you are interested in partnering with us, please get in touch using the form below.