A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup offering fun music apps without any AI prompting

September 14, 2026 | Source: TechCrunch AI

Tags: Vinyl Bar Shibuya, Máuhan Zonoozy, Mantis VC, music apps, pre-seed, Spotify

Former Spotify Head of Innovation Máuhan Zonoozy has raised $5.5M pre-seed to build a suite of playful music-interaction apps — deliberately skipping AI generation in favor of tactile sound tools: stem players, samplers, and browser extensions.

Details

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, founded by Máuhan M Zonoozy (former head of innovation at Spotify), closed a $5.5M pre-seed from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, and others. Former Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff joined as an advisor. The company takes a contrarian position: rather than building another prompt-to-song AI generator, it releases interactive music apps structured like 'singles' in an album series. The current lineup includes Speed Surfer (a Chrome extension that changes playback speed and audio filter), Usersound (audio usernames where each letter maps to a note), Stacks (a 3×3 stem mixer), Drops (a marble-deflection sound generator), and Sampler (turns YouTube videos into beat-synced samplers). The flagship product is bop — an iOS app that layers instruments and effects on a base track with direct export to TikTok and Instagram. Zonoozy explicitly avoids AI prompting, arguing music's future lies in creative interaction rather than generation. He remains open to using AI for infrastructure. A multiplayer remix mode for bop is in development. Before Spotify, Zonoozy founded Bubbl (video clipping/remixing), which was acquired by Cricket Media.