Invest2 publishers3 min readPublished Updated
Balderton bets £20M that an avatar concert can move venues in four days
Unit1 Studio has raised £20 million in equity and production money for avatar concerts it says cost a fraction of ABBA Voyage's £140 million. Its evidence so far is a demonstration show moved between two London venues in four days.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Unit1 Studio has raised £20 million in a mix of equity and production funding, led by Balderton Capital, with existing investors Mercuri, Gilston Music and U2's manager Paul McGuinness taking part.
- ABBA Voyage's production cost £140 million according to accounts of the show's budget, a number other companies treated as a reason not to build anything comparable.
- Unit1 says its demonstration show, screens included, moved into a permanent studio at Tileyard in London in four days, with the CGI reworked to match the new room's lighting and acoustics.
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Why it matters
- constraint At about 14 per cent of ABBA Voyage's £140 million, the round has to carry a company and its first productions at once, so one budget overrun on show one consumes the evidence for show two.
- exposure Balderton has bought into a cost claim outsiders cannot yet test, because Unit1 will confirm artists only when tickets go on sale. That puts the first real budget in public after the money is spent.
- precedent A show that re-rigs into a new room in days can be financed the way touring musicals are, with one build amortised across several cities instead of one purpose-built residency.
- decision Estates and non-touring artists weighing a live product now choose between operators already running hologram tours and a newcomer whose selling point is that the asset moves.
£20 million is about 14 per cent of £140 million [1], and £140 million is the figure every backer of a cheaper avatar show is bidding against, according to the account of ABBA Voyage's production budget [3]. Unit1 did not split the round into equity and production finance, and the build cost of a show of its own is still unpublished [5].
ABBA Voyage has sold more than three million tickets since it opened in London in 2022 [4]. Divide the production cost by the tickets and each seat sold so far carries roughly £47 of build cost [2]. A cheaper build lowers that £47. Moving the build into a second room spreads it over a second audience. That spread is the part of the pitch the money is actually paying for.
The demonstration was a digital KT Tunstall, running at Brompton Technology's test site in Gunnersbury from late 2025 [11]. Unit1 says no avatar concert had ever been transferred complete from one venue to another before [2]. Two of the visual effects specialists it has hired, Greg Meeres Young and Sefki Ibrahim, worked on ABBA Voyage itself [15]. The shows are aimed primarily at artists who cannot tour, with CGI musicians, lighting, sound and staging [10]. The company builds them to be moved and adapted the way touring stage musicals are [14].
"Barney is hugely respected in the industry and has managed to solve a structural problem that everyone knew existed but nobody had cracked," said Daniel Waterhouse, the Balderton general partner who led the deal [7]. Wragg said the company's "ability to develop these shows at a fraction of the cost and replicate them to any location finally makes these shows a commercial reality" [16].
If the cost claim holds, a catalogue artist with no touring capacity can support a residency and then a second city, and £20 million buys more than one attempt. If most of the money is the first production's budget, the second show needs fresh capital before the word fraction can be checked against a second build. The less comfortable reading is that cost was never the binding constraint at all. Base Hologram has toured Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and Whitney Houston, Eyellusion has toured Ronnie James Dio, and HologramUSA runs a permanent venue in Los Angeles [13]. The format has been available for years without producing a second three-million-ticket run.
I'd put the weight on the portable build, for the dull reason that the transfer has happened once and the budget has not been shown. Unit1 had a demonstration up within months of being founded [3], which is quick for a production company and also too short a record for anything to have survived a commercial run. Wragg came to it from senior digital roles at Universal Music, EMI and AEG, and most recently ran Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group [8]. His co-founders are the director Jonathan Butterell and the games technologist Pavle Mihajlovic [9].
The thesis fails if demand is the real ceiling. Three million people bought tickets to ABBA in London [4], and no comparable number has been published for any of the touring hologram shows already on the road [13]. A build at a seventh of the cost still needs a room that fills twice.
What to watch
- The first artist Unit1 names, and whether a production budget is disclosed alongside the ticket on-sale.
- Whether a transfer between cities is also measured in days.
- Whether Unit1 comes back for capital before its second production starts. That would say the £20 million was one show's budget.