Music industry veteran Hari Nair joins AI startup ContentLens as strategic advisor

MUMBAI: Hari Nair has seen enough of the music industry to know where the bodies are buried. As chief executive of Tips Music, and before that in senior roles at Sony Music India, PPL India and TikTok, he spent decades watching content get copied, clipped, remixed and monetised by people who had no right to it. Now he is doing something about it.

ContentLens, a Bengaluru-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to detect copyright infringement, celebrity deepfakes and synthetic media, has appointed Nair as a pro bono strategic adviser. He will guide the company on go-to-market strategy, investor relations and industry partnerships across India and internationally.

The appointment carries a particular weight: Nair is not simply lending his name. He used ContentLens’s technology himself as a paying client before agreeing to advise it. That distinction matters in a sector where advisory roles routinely come bundled with equity or cash. He is taking neither.

Nair said his experience as a client left him in no doubt about the platform’s potential. “As someone who has worked with the technology as a client, I know what it can do,” he said, adding that AI-driven content protection would be critical as content is increasingly replicated and monetised without consent.

The timing is sharp. Generative AI has made it trivially easy to replicate a voice, clone a likeness or reproduce a catalogue at scale, and brutally hard for rights-holders to catch the culprits. ContentLens focuses on music IP protection, celebrity likeness detection, content provenance and deepfake identification, filing patents in fingerprinting, watermarking and audio-visual content intelligence along the way. It claims five large media and entertainment customers and says it is now pushing into its next phase of commercial growth.

Nair brings a CV that opens doors in precisely the rooms ContentLens needs to enter. At TikTok, he led the global launch of Resso, the short-video giant’s music streaming spin-off. At Tips Music, he brokered partnerships with Sony Music Publishing and Warner Music Group. Those relationships, and the trust that comes with them, are not easy to replicate.

Founded by Rohan Sahu, ContentLens is pitching itself as infrastructure for an industry that is only beginning to reckon with what AI can steal. With Nair in its corner, it now has someone who has felt that theft first-hand and is angry enough about it to work for free.