Google’s investment arm Google Ventures has led a $60m funding round for music publishing firm Kobalt, which manages rights for songwriters including Paul McCartney, Sam Smith, Foo Fighters and Beck.

The round takes Kobalt to $126m of total funding since it was founded in 2000. The company collects and pays out royalties for more than 5,000 musicians and 500 music publishers, including income from streaming services Spotify and YouTube.

It also has a separate “label services” division that acts as an alternative to a traditional label deal for artists including Nick Cave, Placebo and Lenny Kravitz to release their music.

Kobalt joins technology companies like Uber and Nest in Google Ventures’ portfolio – Google acquired the latter for $3.2bn in January 2014 – with Kobalt chief executive Willard Ahdritz telling the Guardian that the funding round is proof that the music and technology industries do not always have to be at loggerheads.

“Our investors are backing what I’ve always said from day one: we need trust between technology and music, because these are the technology people who are going to sell our products,” said Ahdritz.

Technology industry veteran Michael Dell’s personal investment company MSD Capital – a previous investor in Kobalt – also took part in the latest funding round.

Kobalt has grown to 250 employees across its 10 offices, including its London headquarters. The company claims to represent on average 40% of the top 100 songs in the US and UK at any one time.

Kobalt will use the funding for global expansion beyond the US and Europe, with Ahdritz telling the Guardian that Latin America and Asia are firmly on the company’s expansion agenda, as it bangs the drum for greater transparency in the digital music world.

“Only in the music industry is it okay to wait for a year to get paid, and not know who your music got sold to, and how much it even sold,” Google Ventures managing partner Bill Maris told the Guardian.

“The company is on a mission to bring trust and transparency to the payment process for artists, which doesn’t really exist right now.”

Google Ventures’ parent company has faced plenty of criticism from musicians and music rightsholders in recent years, over issues including pirate-site links in Google’s search engine and YouTube’s contractual relations with independent record labels.

Willard Ahdritz backs streaming: ‘Spotify has killed the pirates’

However, at a time when many songwriters are uneasy about the royalties they are being paid from streams of their work, Maris sees Kobalt’s technology for tracking music streams and sales then processing the royalties as a potential solution to the unrest around new business models.

“We don’t see them as a music industry company. We look at them as a technology company – but it happens to be in the music industry. It’s a technology company solving a problem in the music industry that’s unique and has been there or a long time, while using some unique technology,” he said.

“It’s adding a layer of trust and transparency that hasn’t existed here before, and showing that maybe this isn’t a dying industry: maybe it’s just one that had a terrible problem.”

Ahdritz has been a prominent defender of streaming services like Spotify and YouTube, with Kobalt releasing figures in November 2014 to show that Spotify had overtaken iTunes as a source of income for its songwriters in Europe for the first time.

“Spotify has killed the pirates,” said Ahdritz, citing a recent survey commissioned in Norway by music industry body IFPI that showed the percentage of people under 30 downloading music illegally had fallen from 80% in 2009 to just 4% in 2014.

“Also, the average rate we are getting out of Spotify is $29 per user while the average for the industry is $37. $29 versus $37 is not so bad, I think,” said Ahdritz.

“If we can then take that $29 from 1.5 billion people listening to music, then we will double the music industry. That is just in front of us: we will execute this, we will double the industry. We will increase that pie, and we will fight for songwriters getting a better slice of that pie.”

Kobalt’s desire for more transparency around digital royalties for songwriters may seem an odd fit for Google Ventures, given its proximity to YouTube, which is famously secretive about the terms of its licensing deals with music publishers and collecting societies – although it is far from alone in that policy.

Even so, Maris praised Kobalt for its potential to make an impact on the way the music industry tracks usage and pays creators, comparing it to Google Ventures’ other notable investments in its willingness to tackle a problem that had seemed unsolvable to many people.

“One person’s challenge is another person’s opportunity. A lot of people, for example, have tried to build a new kind of thermostat and not succeeded. Then Nest came along. Trying to solve the problem of getting a taxi while it’s raining was one that not a lot of people wanted to touch, but then Uber did it,” said Maris.

“Sometimes it just takes the right technology, founder and team. Uber, Nest and Kobalt are examples of that disruption in different industries. And at the end of the day, they’re all technology companies.”

Ahdritz said he is relishing the challenge. “The money gets paid out: I estimate that $2bn in streaming dollars were paid out in the last 12 months. But the pipes are broken, and they need to be fixed. Songwriters and creators need to be represented and paid correctly.”