A Vinly Bar in Shibuya is a startup whose name sounds like an indie band and that focuses on releasing small, interactive music apps and web experiments. The company aims to give people playful tools to manipulate sounds, vocals and musical elements without making generative AI the central feature of every product.
Funding and advisory
The company raised a $5.5 million pre-seed round. Investors include Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Systemic Ventures, and Dawn Ostroff, the former Spotify chief content and advertising business officer, who joined as an advisor.
Founder background
A Vinly Bar in Shibuya was founded by Máuhan M Zonoozy, who previously served as head of innovation at Spotify. Before that he founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup that was acquired by Cricket Media. Zonoozy left Spotify in 2024 and said he wanted to return to building his own products; he believes streaming solved access to music but that most interaction with music remains consumption-driven.
Product approach and current experiments
The startup releases its experiments like “singles” that together form an album. Each app or website enables interaction with different musical elements to create or modify sound. Current projects include:
- Speed Surfer: a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filter of audio playing in your browser window.
- Usersound: a website where you can create an “audio” username, with each letter represented by a note.
- Stacks: a stem player where you construct mixes by turning bars on or off in a 3×3 grid.
- Drops: a playful interface in which placing plaques deflects falling marbles that generate musical notes.
- Sampler: a website that turns YouTube videos into music samplers based on beats from different parts of songs.
Their more ambitious product is an iOS app called bop. In bop, users place instruments and effects in a grid to create different mixes of a base song, adjust tempo, and add one-off effects. Finished mixes can be exported to TikTok or Instagram. The company is also developing a multiplayer version to enable collaborative remixing.
Stance on AI
Zonoozy says the company is deliberately not embedding AI into every part of these apps. He is open to using AI to help build products and strengthen infrastructure, but he does not see AI-driven song generation as the sole future of music. He argues that if AI makes generated content more abundant, then human taste, perspective, interaction and participation become even more valuable—so the startup aims to ensure those qualities are not made rarer.
Roadmap
This year the company plans to release a “musical sandbox mixer” product that will allow users to experiment with various elements of music-making, including the ability to create instruments.
