A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup building a collection of small music interaction apps, announced in 2026 that it has raised a $5.5 million pre-seed funding round. The company was founded by Máuhan M. Zonoozy, who previously served as head of innovation at Spotify before leaving in 2024.
The round was backed by Mantis VC, SV Angel, BoxGroup, Quiet Capital, Remarkable Ventures, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Collaborative Fund, and Systemic Ventures. Former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer Dawn Ostroff also participated and joined the company as an advisor.
The startup releases its apps in a format it likens to singles on an album. Current offerings include Speed Surfer, a Chrome extension that alters the speed and filters of audio playing in a browser; Usersound, a website that generates an audio username from letters mapped to musical notes; Stacks, a stem player using a 3×3 grid; Drops, which creates notes by deflecting marbles off placed plaques; and Sampler, which converts YouTube videos into music samplers. Its iOS app, bop, lets users arrange instruments and effects in a grid to remix a base song and export the result to TikTok or Instagram. A multiplayer version of bop is in development.
Zonoozy said his motivation was rooted in how younger audiences engage with culture. “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 is taking a selective approach to AI, using it for infrastructure but not embedding it throughout its products. “We just don’t necessarily believe that the future of music is simply generation, like song generation via AI,” Zonoozy said, adding that if AI makes content more abundant, human taste and participation become more valuable.
Before Spotify, Zonoozy founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup that was acquired by Cricket Media. A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya plans to release a “musical sandbox mixer” product later in 2026 that would allow users to experiment with music-making elements, including creating instruments.
Source: TechCrunch