Unit1 raises £15M to take hyperrealistic avatar concerts on tour

Unit1, a London company, has raised about £15M — the headline figure is $20M, a mix of equity led by Balderton Capital and production financing — to build out one of the stranger frontiers of applied AI: concerts performed by digital versions of musicians. It calls them avatar concerts, and the point of this round is mobility. Until now this kind of show has meant a fixed, purpose-built arena; Unit1’s pitch is a version that can actually tour.

It is careful to say these are not holograms. The performers are synthesized 3D avatars, rendered with AI-assisted CGI on large LED screens and combined with real stage lighting, sound and staging, so the experience is meant to feel like a gig rather than a video. The use cases are the obvious ones and the uncomfortable ones at once: artists who no longer tour, iconic performances frozen in time, and — inevitably — musicians who have died. The reference point everyone reaches for is ABBA Voyage, the hugely successful but reportedly £140M purpose-built London show; Unit1’s bet is that a cheaper, motion-captured, moveable version can bring the format to many more artists and cities. Its first showcase recreated a two-decade-old KT Tunstall performance, and has now moved into a purpose-built studio at Tileyard London.

The people behind it are the tell that this is a music-industry play as much as a technology one. Unit1 was founded in early 2025 by Barney Wragg, a former chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group and a digital-music veteran of Universal, EMI and AEG. The round, led by Balderton partner Daniel Waterhouse, an early Spotify backer, also drew in music-industry names including Paul McGuinness, who managed U2 for roughly three decades. That cap table matters, because the hard part of this business is not the rendering.

And that is the real story here. The technology to put a convincing avatar on an LED wall is largely a solved, if expensive, problem; what is not solved is the thornier stuff around it — consent, likeness rights, what an artist’s estate will agree to, and whether audiences will pay to watch a performer who is not in the building. Those are cultural and legal questions, not engineering ones, and they are exactly where ventures like this tend to succeed or come unstuck. Unit1’s answer is to do it with the industry rather than around it, leaning on licensing deals and insider relationships rather than treating artists’ likenesses as raw material. It is a genuinely novel British creative-AI bet, and one whose fate will be decided less by the quality of the avatars than by whether the people they depict, and the people who loved them, say yes.