The London-based company, founded by former Andrew Lloyd Webber executive Barney Wragg, plans to use the funding to make avatar concerts portable beyond the single-venue model pioneered by ABBA Voyage.
A Major Round for Avatar Concerts
Unit1 Studio, a UK startup producing concerts featuring digital avatars of musicians, has raised £20 million (roughly $20 million) in new financing to scale its technology and expand its roster of productions. The round was led by Balderton Capital through partner Daniel Waterhouse, an early investor in Spotify, with new investor Saul Klein also joining. Existing backers Mercuri, Gilston Music, and Paul McGuinness, the longtime manager of U2, also participated. The funding, announced on September 21, 2026, combines an equity investment with additional financing tied to concerts already in development.
What Unit1 Studio Does
Founded last year by Barney Wragg, the former chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment group LW Entertainment (previously Really Useful Group) and a veteran of senior digital roles at AEG, EMI and Universal Music Group, Unit1 Studio builds avatar concerts: live-style events in which synthesized, three-dimensional digital models of artists perform on LED screens accompanied by real lighting rigs, sound systems and staging. The company positions itself as an end-to-end independent producer, handling the visual effects pipeline, AI-assisted CGI and the physical production itself, rather than licensing pieces of the process to outside vendors.
To demonstrate its technology, Unit1 built a pilot avatar concert with Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall, a project that was featured on BBC News’ Tech Now programme in December. The company recently moved that demo from a testing facility operated by Brompton Technology in west London to a new permanent studio at Tileyard London, a relocation it says took just four days a process that has traditionally been costly and time-consuming for avatar productions.
Competing With, and Learning From, ABBA Voyage
Unit1’s pitch is closely tied to the success of ABBA Voyage, the avatar concert residency that has run at a purpose-built arena in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park since May 2022. That production has demonstrated strong audience appetite for avatar-based live shows, but its economics have depended on a single custom-built venue, an approach few other artists or catalogue owners can replicate.
“Until now, avatar concerts have been locked behind the economics of ABBA Voyage a one-off, one-location proposition,” Waterhouse said in comments accompanying the announcement. “Unit1’s innovative new technology will fundamentally change that, opening up the genre to a whole generation of legacy artists.” The company argues that its faster, lower-cost production process could make similar shows viable across multiple venues rather than confined to a single dedicated space.
Board and Backing
Alongside the funding, John Kennedy, the former chairman and chief executive of Universal Music UK and the IFPI, has joined Unit1’s board as a non-executive director. Waterhouse described Wragg as bringing “a unique blend of creative vision and commercial nous” to the venture, pointing to his track record of solving what he called a longstanding structural problem in the avatar concert format.
Unit1 has not disclosed which artists or productions are currently in development, nor provided launch dates for its planned commercial shows. Those future deals, rather than the funding round itself, will determine whether the company’s portable production model becomes a repeatable business or remains a proof of concept demonstrated so far only through the KT Tunstall showcase.
Conclusion
Unit1 Studio’s £20 million raise gives the company capital to move from a technical demonstration to commercial deployment, positioning avatar concerts as a growing category within the wider immersive entertainment sector though its long-term viability will depend on the artist partnerships and productions it has yet to announce.
