A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya has raised a US$5.5 million pre-seed round to build a series of small apps that let users play with sounds and vocals, founder Máuhan M. Zonoozy confirmed in a LinkedIn post. The post lists Dawn Ostroff among the round’s backers and states that she has joined the company as an advisor.
The company was founded in 2024. Zonoozy said he left Spotify that year; he had joined Spotify in 2021 as its first Head of Innovation and reported directly to Ostroff. Ostroff’s departure from the streaming service was announced in January 2023 alongside the company’s decision to cut over 500 jobs.
Zonoozy confirmed the raise on LinkedIn with the line, “we raised a pre-seed round to design the future of music.” He thanked 13 investors in the same post without specifying which had taken part in the pre-seed. The 13 named investors were RRE Ventures, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, Quiet Capital, Gold House, Common Metal, Avex Music Group, Systemic Ventures, Remarkable Ventures, Breakers, Mantis Venture Capital, and Collaborative Fund. A company recruitment listing on Wellfound lists total funding at “$9M+” and names both NFX and RRE Ventures among its investors.
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya: product approach and creative intent
Zonoozy has described the company’s origins and design philosophy in his own words: “i started a vinyl bar in shibuya to design music products for the ‘post-streaming’ era. i was (and remain) super inspired by what’s happening in music tech, AI, and gaming, and believe the ‘next spotify’ will be found at the convergence of the three.” He has said the team treats toys and instruments as design principles to create new interfaces for musical expression, calling the practice “musicking.”
In an essay published on X, Zonoozy further defined the company model as “a label that treats software like music: web apps as singles, native apps as EPs, essays as liner notes, prototypes as B-sides.” He has called the model “cultureware” and said the company is “building a band, not a team.” The company is headquartered in New York, where its current job listings are based.
Products announced or available include Stacks, a stem player built on a three-by-three grid, and Speed Surfer, a Chrome extension that alters playback speed and filtering of audio in an open browser tab. Its iOS app Bop launched in beta in April; Bop lets users arrange instruments and effects on a grid to build their own versions of a song and then send the results to TikTok or Instagram. A multiplayer version of Bop is in development, and the company plans to release a sandbox-style mixing product this year that would let users create their own instruments.
On AI, Zonoozy said he built an AI music tool called Hugging Bass after leaving Spotify, then walked away from that direction. He told colleagues that the company has chosen not to build AI into every part of its apps and does not “necessarily believe that the future of music is simply generation.” He remains open to using AI to build products and strengthen infrastructure; the company added a prompt-based feature for creating sounds after testing its apps, prompting a revision of earlier statements that the apps were free of AI prompting.
Avex Music Group, named among the investors, is the global music division of Tokyo-listed Avex. Avex announced an initial commitment of USD $100 million in April to acquiring publishing catalogs and companies, and also backs Hook, an AI-powered remixing and mashup app that raised USD $10 million in a Series A led by Khosla Ventures in February.
Zonoozy has been an entrepreneur in residence at Collaborative Fund since earlier this year, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before joining Spotify he founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing company acquired by Cricket Media in 2018. By October 2022 he was described as Spotify’s Head of Content Business Innovation and Market Intelligence when billed to speak at the Music Tectonics conference.
Zonoozy ended his LinkedIn post with a brief hiring note: “(oh, and we’re hiring – hmu!)”
