Digital avatar concerts like ‘ABBA Voyage’ could become commonplace in cities and with more legacy artists, after London startup Unit1 Studio said it could reproduce Voyage-like shows in almost any venue.
Unit1 has also now raised $20 million in an equity+financing Seed round to build more of them, but fans will have to wait. Asked when the first shows would launch, founder Barney Wragg said it "won't be this year." Pressed on 2027, he said: "I'm not speculating."
Wragg is the former CEO of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group (recently renamed LW Entertainment) and has previously held senior roles at AEG, EMI and Universal Music Group.
Some $7 million of the $20 million raised is equity, Wragg said. The rest is described as ‘production financing’. London’s Balderton Capital led the equity round, joined by Mercuri, Gilston Music and U2's former long-time manager Paul McGuinness, among others.
The financing is a "slate" deal to option rights and start development on new projects, each of which will need further investment. "We're like a film producer or a Broadway producer," Wragg said during “an interview with Pathfounders, “in that we need money to be able to develop these shows."
The proof of concept is a demo concert featuring UK singer KT Tunstall, best known in the 90s and early 2000s, although still touring. Unit1 moved it from a supplier's test facility in Gunnersbury, west London, where it had been since autumn 2025, to a new studio at Tileyard London. The four-day move included tuning visuals, lighting and sound to the new room.
Wragg says cost is what has held avatar concerts back. ABBA Voyage was "unbelievably expensive to deploy," he said, putting the figure at "hundreds of millions." "The problem was the cost of the screen content," he said, rather than the screen itself, which has reached commodity pricing in recent years.
Unit1's approach is to build shows on a video game engine, Unreal Engine 5, rather than Hollywood-style film effects, which are rendered shot by shot, and therefore far more expensive to produce. That lets it work on the show ‘live’ in the venue. "We're able to put our stuff on real time on the screen, light it, move it, have a director in the space," Wragg said. The older Hollywood method of re-rendering images after each change, he said, "can take weeks or months." He says this could appeal more to a younger audience used to a ‘live’ feel.
The company claims its shows can recoup their costs in under a year, though it has published no cost figures. It says the same process could support touring or short-run versions, and several copies of a show running at once.
Venues would need little more than empty space, Wragg said. "We essentially just need a black box that we load our screens into." That could mean converting vacant town-centre buildings such as unused retail space, as Unit1 did with an office block at Tileyard.
Unusually, artists don't have to be scanned, either. For acts that can no longer tour, "we can create the avatars from existing photos and existing video footage," Wragg said. Tunstall, who is alive, was scanned so audiences could compare the avatar with the real thing. Asked what draws him to the idea, Wragg pointed to artists he never got to see: "I could go and see Janis Joplin. I could see Jimi Hendrix." However, Unit1 hasn't said whether either is in development.
The demo is much smaller than a 3,000-seat production, though Unit1 says the relocation process is the same. Wragg said he believes Unit1 is the only company producing such shows with its own in-house VFX and avatar technology. Other firms, including ILM, which worked on ABBA Voyage, act as VFX suppliers rather than producers.
Unit1 has also appointed former Universal Music UK and IFPI chief John Kennedy as a non-executive director. It has hired VFX artists Greg Meeres Young and Sefki Ibrahim, whose credits include Planet of the Apes, Lord of the Rings and ABBA Voyage.
In a statement, Daniel Waterhouse, General Partner at Balderton commented: "Until now, avatar concerts have been locked behind the economics of ABBA Voyage - a one-off, one-location proposition. Unit1's innovative new technology will fundamentally change that, opening up the genre to a whole generation of legacy artists.”