Roneil Rumburg is a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and angel investor best known as co-founder and CEO of Audius, a decentralized music streaming protocol built on blockchain infrastructure. Before founding Audius in 2018, Rumburg worked as an investor at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he focused on consumer and technology deals. That institutional background shaped how he approaches early-stage bets: look for products with a direct consumer hook and a credible reason to be decentralized.
Audius became his primary claim to prominence. The protocol lets artists publish music directly to a peer-to-peer network, bypassing traditional label intermediaries. The project attracted backing from General Catalyst, Multicoin Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Blockchange Ventures, among others. Audius raised approximately $5.5 million in a 2019 seed round and secured additional capital in subsequent years. The platform's native token, $AUDIO, launched in 2020 and gave users governance rights over the protocol. At peak activity Audius reported over 7 million monthly listeners, making it one of the largest decentralized media applications by user count.
A high-profile 2022 partnership with TikTok – allowing creators to share Audius tracks directly to the short-video platform – brought mainstream visibility. However, Audius also faced a significant setback in July 2022 when an attacker exploited a governance vulnerability in its smart contracts and drained approximately $6 million in $AUDIO tokens. The team responded quickly, halted the exploit, and recovered a portion of the funds. The incident was a public test of the protocol's resilience and transparency.
Notable investments
Rumburg's angel activity is relatively limited in publicly disclosed detail. His five-investment portfolio, as catalogued on deal-tracking platforms, reflects a Web3-native thesis concentrated on creator economies, consumer crypto, and decentralized media infrastructure. Specific deal names and check sizes have not been widely disclosed in press coverage or regulatory filings. Public information about individual portfolio companies beyond Audius itself is limited.
- Audius ($AUDIO) – Co-founder and primary operating focus; decentralized music streaming protocol on Solana and Ethereum.
- Four additional early-stage investments in crypto and Web3 – specific names not publicly confirmed at the time of writing.
Team
Rumburg co-founded Audius alongside Forrest Browning, who served as CTO. Both have Stanford University ties. Rumburg's operator-investor hybrid background is central to his identity: he built and runs a live protocol while selectively backing others at the earliest stage. There is no separate fund structure or investment firm associated with his angel activity – he invests as an individual.
Recent activity
Through 2024 and into 2025, Rumburg remained focused on Audius product and growth rather than expanding a public angel portfolio. Audius continued developing its mobile applications and pursuing integrations with social platforms. The protocol's governance and tokenomics received ongoing iteration following the 2022 exploit. No new major fund raises or high-profile angel deals attributed to Rumburg were publicly announced in this period.
For an investor with Rumburg's profile – a founder-operator who angel invests selectively on the side – the portfolio count of five positions is consistent with a high-conviction, low-volume approach. His edge is domain knowledge: he runs one of the few decentralized consumer media platforms that reached genuine scale, which gives him a credible lens on what creator-economy infrastructure actually needs. Investors and founders tracking the decentralized music or broader consumer Web3 space can follow his public commentary via @roneilr on X (Twitter) and through Audius's official channels. Additional background is available on Crunchbase.