GuitarBots

Yousician

Industry	Music education
Founded	December 2010; 6 years ago (2010-12)
Founder	Chris Thür and Mikko Kaipainen
Headquarters	Helsinki, Finland
Key people	Chris Thür, (CEO, co-founder) Mikko Kaipainen, (COO, co-founder) Anssi Klapuri, (CTO) Seva Moshanin, (CMO)
Products	Yousician for Guitar, Piano, Ukulele, Bass Yousician for Educators GuitarTuna
Number of employees	55
Website	official website

Yousician is an interactive music service to learn and play a musical instrument. Yousician currently supports guitar, piano, ukulele and bass, and is available on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux platforms. Yousician analyses the users’ playing on their real musical instruments, and provides them with instant feedback and guidance. Yousician claims to be the world’s largest music educator.

Yousician Ltd. is a Helsinki based music education company founded by Chris Thür and Mikko Kaipainen in 2010 under the name Ovelin, and was part of the Startup Sauna accelerator programme at Aalto University. Yousician states its mission as "Making musicality as common as literacy". The company develops and operates a music service called Yousician, and a tuner application called GuitarTuna. As of December 2016, Yousician claims over 8 million monthly active users worldwide across their products. In 2012, the company raised $1.4m from Silicon Valley-based investor True Ventures.

The Yousician service is built on audio signal processing technology that can recognize notes and chords played by its users on their real instruments (both acoustic and electric). Users are shown either sheet music or tablature notation for an exercise, and hear a backing track as they play along. Using the built-in microphone of the device, Yousician listens to the users play, gives feedback on accuracy and timing, and tracks users’ progress over time.