Jacob Varghese

Founder & CEO, Noctil

Jacob has spent much of his career building systems around a deceptively difficult problem: connecting data well enough for businesses to trust what happens next.

More than a decade ago, he worked on the technical architecture of SCAPR’s Virtual Recording Database (VRDB), helping build infrastructure that allows rights organizations around the world to exchange recording, performer and rights information. That work introduced him to a problem he continues to work on today.

Music rights are ultimately connected through data. A recording has to connect to the right work; a work to the right writers and publishers; performers and rightsholders to recordings; assets to agreements; usage to repertoire; rights to territories. And eventually, all of it has to connect to money. When those relationships are incomplete or wrong, the consequences surface downstream as unmatched usage, conflicting claims, incorrect registrations, manual investigation, and royalties that are difficult to distribute or collect.

Today, Jacob is the founder and CEO of Noctil, which builds infrastructure for music and audiovisual organizations working through these challenges. Noctil’s work spans metadata and repertoire management, matching, rights and ownership relationships, agreements, registrations, usage processing, royalty operations, and international data exchange.

Before founding Noctil, Jacob spent more than two decades in technology and enterprise architecture, including roles with Tata Consultancy Services, Capgemini and Acumen Solutions. That background shapes his view of the industry: technology is rarely the hardest part. The harder problem is understanding how data, business rules, people and systems need to work together reliably at scale.

He writes about music rights, metadata, matching, royalties, technology and AI, along with the occasional lesson from building a company around them.

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