Seven international startups will compete for the Best Onstage Pitch at Montreal’s Startup Festival next month, including an Atlantic Canadian entry that may be the most international startup you’ll ever find.

The company is Tunedly, which has developed an online music studio. And it is – deep breath – a Charlottetown-based music-tech company that was founded by a German man and French woman who were living in Ireland; they nurtured the company in the Canary Islands, took it to an accelerator in upstate New York and received financing from three jurisdictions, including Arkansas.

Founders Chris Erhardt (Germany) and Mylène Besançon (France) learned this week that Tunedly will present at the Best Onstage Pitch competition at the Startup Festival July 12 to 15 in Montreal. Erhardt said the selection is a sign the company is headed in the right direction.

“Not only does the opportunity give us tremendous visibility to potential users and business partners, but it also underlines the fact that we are building something that is desperately needed in the music industry, and people are excited about the solution we are building,” said Erhardt, who has a background in the music business.

Tunedly’s online solution lets musicians and singers record high quality music together regardless of where they are. No longer are musicians constrained by their location or the need to book expensive studio time. Using Tunedly, they can save time and money, avoid travel and still produce high-quality tracks.

Erhardt and Besançon conceived of the idea when they were living in Dublin. The Irish capital has a thriving music scene, but they found the city expensive, so they spent a lot of time in the Canary Islands as they developed the product. Then they found another problem: if they wanted to get funding for their startup, they would be best off in North America. So they hopped on a plane and flew to the western hemisphere in January, 2016.

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Once they were in North America, they learned of Canada’s Startup Visa program, which allows foreigners with young companies to come to Canada and build their companies here. After talking to a few potential sponsors, they signed up with Launchpad PEI and settled in Charlottetown. (Last month, they were granted landed immigrant status for Canada.)

The founders gained a bit of traction with musicians, but they wanted to scale their company more quickly. So they applied to and were accepted into the StartFast Venture Accelerator in Syracuse, N.Y., which they attended last summer. It helped them make contacts with groups like the U.S. songwriters’ organization Ascap and the Songwriters Association of Canada. By the time it left the accelerator, Tunedly’s monthly revenues topped $10,000 and have never fallen below that level.

To continue scaling, the company sought to raise revenue. Tunedly received US$25,000 from StartFast on entering the program, and when it graduated the accelerator decided to top it up with an additional US$75,000 investment. The company gained investment from Island Capital Partners, the new $4 million investment fund established by private investors and the provincial government in P.E.I. And Erhardt, who used to live in northern Arkansas, also tapped an old contact Jeff Amerine from Fayetteville, who is familiar to Atlantic Canadians due to frequent visits to the region for MentorCamp and other events.

So far, the company has raised about US$200,000 and hopes to raise a further US$300,000 for its current funding round.

Erhardt said the strength of the company is its six-member team, with diversified skill sets, and that it is solving a timely problem.

“Everything in the music industry has changed in the past 20 years but the only thing that hasn’t changed is the way we record music,” he said. “We try to tackle this one problem where you can record live music from the comfort of your home. It can produce the same quality as if you were in a studio in Nashville, Tennessee.”