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This year’s winner of BREW’s $100K pitch competition wants to help musicians collaborate

Modern artists have digital tools to help them create music, but collaboration with other musicians often involves emailing files back and forth, which often isn’t ideal for the creative process. 

DAWn Audio (DAW stands for digital audio workstations) wants to bridge compatibility between those tools, helping musicians collaborate in real time even if they’re miles apart from each other. The New Orleans startup won a $100,000 investment at the Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week pitch event held Friday, which they hope will be the first chunk of a $750,000 seed round. 

Diego Pinzon, a drummer and DAWn Audio’s CEO and co-founder, says he would get frustrated when he wanted to work with friends in his native New Jersey. Even if you’re in the same room, working together is difficult if you’re using different software. 

“I was thinking there had to be a better way to do this,” he says. “We’re hoping to leverage our tool to let artists do what they love on their own terms.” 

Pinzon studied computational engineering and music science and technology at Tulane, where the company started out as a class project. Friends and family funding helped DAWn Audio get to the beta stage of the product. Invited artists currently are testing the app and providing feedback, ahead of a proper launch possibly by August or September of this year. 

This story originally appeared in a May 8 issue of Daily Report. To keep up with Baton Rouge business and politics, subscribe to the free Daily Report e-newsletter here.