UK-based music technology company Roli is in emergency refinancing talks after lender TriplePoint filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators. In total, the Roli venture has raised roughly $51m over its lifetime.
Roli makes the Seaboard touch-sensitive keyboard and related music software. Its latest accounts, covering the year to June 2024, reported a £26.1 million loss and cumulative losses of £46.1 million.
The filing, made on Tuesday and naming insolvency practitioners from RSM, gives Roli temporary protection from creditor action while rescue talks continue, according to a report in The Times. Eight months ago, an in-house recruiter for Roli was "looking for a finance leader” on LinkedIn.
Roli’s website is currently under maintenance, and its products are listed as out of stock. Customers have recently complained about delayed or unfulfilled orders, product faults and poor customer service, with one customer complaining only three days ago.
According to Companies House, founder Roland Lamb was removed as a director of Luminary Roli in April.
The company previously collapsed into administration in 2021 after attracting backing from music producers Pharrell Williams, Grimes, the electronic artist, and the UK government’s Future Fund. It was later relaunched under the control of UK VC Hoxton Ventures.
Roli initially launched with an undisclosed round from LocalGlobe in 2013, followed by a $12.8m Seed round led by Balderton Capital in 2014, a $3.7m Series A led by Horizons Ventures in 2014, and a $27m Series B from Foundry Group in 2016. Various corporate or debt financing rounds followed.
In 2021, Roli filed for administration and rebooted as a spinout called Roli Luminary, under Roli founder and CEO Roland Lamb and Chief People Officer Corey Harrow. At that point, it closed the $6.85m in funding led by Hoxton.
In November 2025, Roli announced that Ultraleap, a provider of extended reality (XR) technologies such as hand tracking and mid-air haptics, would join Roli, after the Tencent-backed startup was sold for parts following further layoffs.
Suffice it to say that Roli, in making its own high-spec, relatively high-cost instruments, was competing in a market dominated by cheap products made in China. It even made a keyboard which turned into a previously long-lost instrument called a Theramin (see video below).
Roli, and Hoxton Ventures were approached for comment for this story, but neither responded at the time of publication.
