The Music Startup That Deliberately Kept AI Out of Its Apps
A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raised $5.5 million to build playful music tools. Its founder, a former Spotify head of innovation, thinks human taste gets more valuable as AI-generated songs get cheaper.
Key points
- A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round in 2025 from eleven investors including Mantis VC, SV Angel, and Boxgroup.
- Founder Máuhan M Zonoozy was head of innovation at Spotify before leaving in 2024.
- The company has released several small music apps and plans a "musical sandbox mixer" later this year.
- Despite the AI boom, Zonoozy has chosen to keep AI out of most products by design.
Most music startups right now are racing to put AI at the centre of everything. A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is doing the opposite, and it just picked up $5.5 million to prove the bet.
The San Francisco company, first reported by TechCrunch, announced its pre-seed round this week. Backers include Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures and others. Dawn Ostroff, who ran Spotify's content and advertising business, joined as an advisor and also invested.
Who built this, and why?
Founder Máuhan M Zonoozy spent years at Spotify as head of innovation before leaving in 2024. Before that, he built Bubbl, a video-clipping startup acquired by Cricket Media.
His argument is simple. Streaming solved the problem of finding music. It did nothing for the urge to play with it. Younger audiences already treat culture as raw material: they remix sounds in games and transform their faces with filters. Music hasn't given them the same sandbox.
What do the apps actually do?
The company releases small apps the way a band drops singles. Each isolates a different idea.
Speed Surfer is a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filters of any audio playing in your browser tab. Usersound lets you build an audio username where each letter of your name becomes a musical note. Stacks is a stem player, meaning it separates a song into individual layers such as drums, bass and melody, so you can mute or remix them on a grid. Drops has you position tiles on a board so that falling marbles bounce off them and produce notes. Sampler turns any YouTube video into a music sampler by detecting the beats inside it.
The most developed product is an iOS app called bop. You arrange virtual instruments and effects on a grid, adjust the tempo, add one-off sound effects, and export directly to TikTok or Instagram. A multiplayer version, where several people remix the same song together in real time, is in development.
Later this year the team plans a larger "musical sandbox mixer" that would let users build their own instruments from scratch.
Why leave AI out?
Zonoozy uses AI to build infrastructure. He does not want it generating the music itself.
"I think 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," he told TechCrunch. "We're just trying to make sure it doesn't make it even rarer."
That's a pointed position, and one our 7 September story on designers staying irreplaceable as AI handles grunt work found echoed across creative industries. The bet isn't that AI-generated music is bad. It's that when anyone can generate a song in seconds, the ability to feel and shape music becomes the scarce thing. Whether a suite of browser toys and mobile apps can build that into a real business is the open question worth watching.
