A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raises $5.5M pre-seed for playful music-making apps

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup whose name sounds more like an indie band than a company, is building a series of small apps that let people play with sounds and vocals using generative AI prompts in the style of any artist. It has raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Quiet Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Collaborative Fund, and Systemic Ventures, with former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer Dawn Ostroff joining as an advisor.

The startup was built by Máuhan M. Zonoozy, Spotify’s former head of innovation, who previously founded video clipping and remixing startup Bubbl, later acquired by Cricket Media. Zonoozy, who left Spotify in 2024, said streaming solved music’s access problem but left most interaction centered on consumption. “I think when I looked at emergent behaviors and younger audiences, like everyone’s growing up playing with culture through games, through filters, through creation tools. And I just felt like there was an opportunity to empower people to do something similar with music,” he told TechCrunch.

The company releases its experiments as “singles” within an album, each centered on interacting with sound. Speed Surfer is a Chrome extension that alters the speed and filter of browser audio; Usersound lets users build an “audio” username where each letter is a note; Stacks is a stem player for mixing via a 3x3 grid of toggleable bars; Drops creates musical notes from marbles deflected by placed plaques; and Sampler turns YouTube videos into samplers based on a song’s beats. Its more ambitious product is bop, an iOS app that lets users place instruments and effects in a grid to remix a base song, adjust tempo, and export mixes to TikTok or Instagram; a multiplayer version is in the works, and the company recently added a prompt-based sound-creation feature.

Zonoozy said the company is making an informed choice not to infuse AI into every part of its apps, though he’s open to using it to build products and infrastructure. “AI is obviously extraordinarily powerful, but I think we just don’t necessarily believe that the future of music is simply generation, like song generation via AI… if AI starts to make that content more abundant, it actually makes taste and human perspective and interaction and participation even more important and even more valuable. And we’re just trying to make sure it doesn’t make it even rarer,” he said. This year, the company plans to release a “musical sandbox mixer” that would let users build their own instruments.

Why it matters

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya’s bet — that AI’s abundance of generated content raises rather than lowers the value of human taste and participation — cuts against startups pursuing pure AI song generation, positioning it instead as a tools-for-creators play.