A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya has raised a $5.5 million seed round to develop a series of small apps that allow users to interact with sounds and singing and build musical experiences rather than simply consume songs. The company is led by Máuhan M. Zonoozy, Spotify’s former chief innovation officer, who left the company in 2024.
The round included Mantis VC, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Quiet Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Collaborative Fund, and Systemic Ventures, along with Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s former president of content and advertising, who also joined the company as an adviser.
Small Apps for Manipulating Sound
The company presents its experiences as if they were “singles” within an album, and most of them share an approach that turns musical elements into interfaces that can be played and modified. The Speed Surfer Chrome extension changes the speed of the sound and the filter used while it plays in the browser window, while Usersound turns each letter of a user-selected sound’s name into a note.
Stacks allows users to create a sound mix by turning bars on or off within a 3×3 grid. Drops, meanwhile, uses boards placed in a certain pattern to change the path of falling balls, with each producing musical notes. Sampler turns clips from YouTube into musical samples according to the rhythms found in different parts of the video.
The bop App and Expansion Toward Collaboration
The most ambitious product is an iOS app called bop, where users can place musical instruments and effects within a grid to create different mixes based on a core song. They can also adjust the tempo and add one-time-use effects, then export the result to TikTok or Instagram.
The company is also working on a multiplayer version of the app that allows users to remix songs with other people, and it recently added a feature based on text prompts to create sound. This year, the company aims to launch a product it describes as a “musical sandbox” that allows experimentation with elements of music-making, including creating musical instruments.
What Distinguishes the Approach from Music Generators?
Zonoozy believes that the future of music will not be limited to generating songs through artificial intelligence. The company therefore chose not to integrate AI into every part of its apps, while leaving the door open to using it in product development and infrastructure improvement.
The key takeaway is that the company is betting on making users participants in the creative process, rather than merely recipients of an automatically generated result. This approach gives value to experience, choice, and interaction, but leaves open questions about whether these apps can become widely used products and about the rights to use music clips and YouTube content when reshaping them. The source does not provide details about the revenue model or availability scope, so the project’s commercial impact cannot yet be assessed conclusively.