After severing business relations with Kanye West, also known as Ye, the British audio and computer hardware startup, Kano, plans to solicit equity capital from its customers and admirers in an effort to chart a new course. Did Kanye affect the company's net worth?
Alex Klein, the CEO of Kano, told CNBC that the company will launch a Crowdcube campaign on Tuesday. Regular people will be able to own a portion of Kano alongside Microsoft and billionaire investor Jim Breyer's Breyer Capital, among others.
It seeks to raise $900,000 from private investors in the United Kingdom and Europe. The company intends to expand the crowdfund to the United States.
Throughout the years, the company Kano, which offers technology aimed at musicians and artists, has seen several drastic changes.
The company's primary audio product is the Stem Player, a puck-shaped gadget that allows users to separate songs into different tracks such as voice, bass, and drums.
Kano partnered with major companies to develop a handful of goods, including a Harry Potter wand that users could modify with code, a Windows version of its modular Kano PC, and a "Frozen"-inspired coding kit. It has now discontinued production of these devices and no longer offers any of its products to large-scale stores. Klein met with Kanye West in 2019, the disgraced rapper and singer who has been increasingly shunned by the business community due to his antisemitic statements.
The two then discussed the origins of what would later become the Stem Player. It was previously referred to as the "Donda Stem Player," a reference to Kanye West's tenth studio album, "Donda."
On February 23, 2022, Ye's eleventh studio album, "Donda 2," was released exclusively on the Stem Player. How the knot unraveled there followed antisemitic shouts from Ye.
In October, West made multiple derogatory comments regarding Jewish people, including repeated attacks on "Jewish media" using the antisemitic argument that Jews dominate the media disproportionately. Klein, in an exclusive interview with CNBC, recalls one of Ye's advisors claiming that the rapper couldn't complete a deal to purchase Kano "because one of the investors is Jewish." Klein claims that these opinions were communicated both publicly and privately.
Meanwhile, another Ye disaster is confronting another company - Adidas. After severing connections with rapper and fashion designer Kanye West over his egregious antisemitism, the German company warned on February 9 that it faced enormous losses if it was unable to sell its inventory, raising doubts about its alternatives for the now-tainted brand, including burning the shoes.
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