Reactional Music Ties EIC Accelerator Money to Licensed Game Music

The EIC project puts spending on cosmetic personalisation in games at more than €62 billion; music, by an industry estimate Amanotes cited in 2023, accounted for under 0.001% of the games market. Reactional Music, a Stockholm company, wants to change that by licensing commercial songs for use inside games and letting players buy them as in-game items. Its engine does not loop a recording in the background: it generates music note by note with virtual instruments, so a theme can change key, tempo or instrumentation as the game demands, and line itself up with a licensed track.

The project, REACT, appears in the EIC Accelerator's May 2026 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,999 under an agreement signed on 23 September 2026, for a project running from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The company announced on 22 June 2026 that the EIC had also allocated up to €6.5 million in future equity to match incoming capital, a figure Pocket Gamer.biz reported the same week. That equity is conditional, and no EIC investment had been announced in the sources reviewed by 4 November 2026.

A composer's tool turned into a licensing business

The technology began as Gestrument, a composition tool whose website names Jesper Nordin as its inventor and carries the notice that Gestrument AB has changed its name to Reactional Music Group AB. The CORDIS objective also describes the company as founded by the composer. The founding year is reported two ways: Funnelfeedr's company record gives 2016, while Techarenan wrote in 2023 that the company was founded in 2012.

Funnelfeedr lists the company as active, with revenue in the band of 1 to 5 million Swedish kronor, 5 to 9 employees, Tomas Jenneborg as CEO and Kelly Sumner, a former chief executive of Take-Two Interactive, as chair. Digital Music News also names Sumner as chairman and reports that Jenneborg started earlier in 2026. The filed annual accounts could not be read for this article: the Swedish register services allabolag.se and bolagsfakta.se could not be accessed when checked on 4 November 2026, so no year-by-year revenue, loss or equity figure is given here.

How the engine works

The engine page sets it against conventional game audio middleware, which layers pre-recorded loops and stems. Reactional generates each note in real time, lets the game change musical parameters through an API, and sends note and beat events back so that gameplay can follow the music. It is available for Unity and Unreal Engine, with Godot listed as coming soon. The developer documentation describes a composer tool, an online platform where studios pair interactive themes with "Reactional Ready" licensed tracks, and bundles that ship inside the game.

The project describes the engine as patented, a claim repeated in the company's release republished by Game Developer; the patent numbers are not given in either. At Unreal Fest in October 2024, the company says, it turned a track composed on stage into an interactive game soundtrack in about ten minutes.

The catalogue and the label deals

The CORDIS objective counts more than six million rights-cleared tracks and more than 50 label relationships, and InterSpace Daily reported the same figures in June 2026, naming Ninja Tune, Beggars Group and Naxos. Music Week reported the Beggars deal in September 2024 and listed Defected, Cherry Red, Hopeless Records, Hipgnosis Song Management and APM Music among the other licensors. In December 2025 the company announced a partnership with MusicInfra to track music use and handle payments to rights holders, also covered by Digital Music News.

Licensing deals give the company songs to offer; they are not sales. None of the announcements reviewed discloses a fee, a revenue share or a minimum guarantee.

The customer question

The first commercial partner was Amanotes, a mobile music games publisher that co-led a pre-Series A round of $2.05 million with Butterfly Ventures, as reported by Pocket Gamer.biz in April 2023 and announced by Amanotes, which called it a seven-figure round. Amanotes said it planned to add music personalisation to Magic Tiles 3 and Tiles Hop. In August 2023 Music Week reported that Amanotes and its partner studios were expected to be the first to sell music as an in-game purchase through Reactional, with the platform live for commercial use in 2023.

Three years on, the record of that launch is thin. A web search on 4 November 2026 found no announcement that Magic Tiles 3, Tiles Hop or any other named game sells Reactional music, and the engine page names no commercial title. The REACT objective itself still lists Amanotes as a pilot that "will validate transaction economics", which places the in-game purchase model in the future tense.

A shift towards mobile advertising

By the autumn of 2026 the company's home page led with a different product: commercial hit songs placed into the playable and video ads that mobile game publishers buy to acquire players, exported to networks such as AppLovin, Google Ads and Unity Ads, with no upfront payment and pricing tied to ad performance. Digital Music News described the same offer in June 2026. On 21 September 2026 the company said that more than 12 mobile game publishers, with combined advertising budgets of $2 billion to $3 billion, had asked to join its early access programme. It did not name them.

The EIC project, as CORDIS describes it, does not mention advertising: its four revenue streams are business-to-business licensing, in-game music purchases, co-development with studios and a self-service platform for independent developers. The home page presents the ad product as built on the Reactional Engine and its pre-cleared catalogue, the same platform the project funds, sold into a market the project plan does not name. Whether advertising or in-game sales carries the company's revenue is not public.

What REACT promises

The project's stated aim is to take the platform from technology readiness level 6 to level 9 through backend and API upgrades, automated rights handling, AI-driven music recommendations and pilot validation, ending in a market launch. The company says the money will go into scaling music delivery, optimising its game engine SDKs and expanding its rights and royalty infrastructure. The project started on 1 October 2026, so none of this can yet be checked against results.

1. Engine and SDKs for game enginesExistsUnity and Unreal plugins documented; Godot listed as coming soon.
2. Rights-cleared catalogueClaimed6M+ tracks and 50+ label relationships per CORDIS and InterSpace Daily; several deals reported by Music Week.
3. Music sold as an in-game purchaseNot shownNo named game selling music through Reactional found on 4 November 2026.
4. TRL 9 and market launchToo earlyProject runs to September 2028.

The money

The EIC grant recorded in CORDIS is larger than the only funding round with a disclosed amount, the $2.05 million of April 2023, which Techarenan converted to €1.85 million. Aggregator totals for the company's funding differ from each other and are not used here. The €6.5 million of EIC equity depends on the company raising matching private capital, and no such round has been announced.

The European angle

The CORDIS objective frames REACT around cultural intellectual property, digital sovereignty and fair pay for creators: a European rights and royalty layer through which labels are paid when their music is used in games. The European Parliament asked in its resolution on esports and video games of 10 November 2022, adopted by 560 votes to 34, for a long-term European video game strategy and more support for research and development in the sector. REACT addresses that brief through music licensing rather than game development; whether it adds to the European sector depends on licences turning into sales, which the public record does not yet show.

Reactional Music has not been asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.