A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup founded by former Spotify head of innovation Máuhan M Zonoozy, has raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round to build a series of small music apps that deliberately avoid generative AI prompting, according to Techcrunch.
The round was led by a group of investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC and Systemic Ventures. Dawn Ostroff, the former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer, also invested and joined the company as an advisor. Zonoozy left Spotify in 2024 and said he had always wanted to return to building something of his own, telling Techcrunch that streaming solved the access problem while most interaction with music remained centered on consumption.
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Key facts
- The startup raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round from ten named venture firms and former Spotify executive Dawn Ostroff, who became an advisor.
- Founder Máuhan M Zonoozy was formerly head of innovation at Spotify and left the company in 2024; he earlier founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup acquired by Cricket Media.
- Released experiments include Speed Surfer, a Chrome extension for changing playback speed and filtering browser audio; Usersound, where users build an “audio” username with letters mapped to notes; Stacks, a 3×3 stem player; Drops, a marble-deflection game that produces notes; and Sampler, which turns YouTube videos into samplers.
- The company’s more ambitious product is an iOS app called bop, which lets users place instruments and effects on a grid to remix a base song, adjust tempo, add one-time effects and export mixes to TikTok or Instagram.
- A multiplayer remix version is in development, and the company aims to release a “musical sandbox mixer” this year.
Apps treated as singles on an album
Zonoozy frames the releases as something closer to a record than a software portfolio: each experiment ships like a single that belongs to the same album. The unifying idea is direct manipulation of sound rather than describing a desired track in text and waiting for a model to produce it.
Bop is the clearest expression of that approach. Users arrange musical instruments and effects across a grid to generate different mixes of a base song, tweak tempo, apply one-off effects, and export the result to TikTok or Instagram without leaving the app. The planned multiplayer mode would let people remix tracks together rather than alone.
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An explicit bet against prompt-first music
The company is making what Zonoozy described as an informed choice not to infuse AI into every part of its apps, even as other new startups build tools that generate music in the style of any artist from a prompt. He said AI is powerful, but that the company does not believe the future of music is simply song generation by AI, and argued that if AI makes content more abundant, taste, human perspective and participation become more valuable. He added that the company wants to avoid making those things rarer. Zonoozy said he remains open to using AI to build the products and to keep the underlying infrastructure solid.
Why it matters
The funding tests whether listeners want to play with music rather than prompt it. For investors, the round puts capital behind a founder with a large-platform track record and a stated contrarian position on generative AI at a moment when prompt-based music tools are drawing most of the attention. Zonoozy’s argument is that younger audiences already grow up shaping culture through games, filters and creation tools, and that music has lagged that behavior as consumption, not participation, dominated the experience. The company’s small, single-purpose apps are a low-cost way to find out whether that gap is real before committing to a larger product.
What to watch
The concrete near-term milestones are the release of the planned “musical sandbox mixer,” which the company aims to ship this year and which would let users work with different elements of music-making, including creating instruments, and the multiplayer version of bop. How many users the free-to-try experiments convert into repeat use will determine whether the album-of-singles strategy holds up.
Reported by techcrunch.com.
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