- Stockholm AI startup Tonada has raised $3M in pre-seed funding to replace licensed background music in physical retail and hospitality with AI-generated, royalty-free sound.
- Antler led the funding round, with participation from Spintop Ventures, RTP Global, Triple A VC, Karaoke Club, and angel investors like Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch.
- A study of 1.8 million retail transactions found that playing the wrong music actually hurt sales more than having no music.
Juan Manuel Serruya worked for years as an engineering lead at Spotify and saw a problem the company couldn’t fix. Many cafés, hotels, and stores played Spotify using personal accounts, which aren’t licensed for commercial use.
Spotify gets music from labels and publishers for personal use, but playing that music in a business requires a different, more expensive license. Even Spotify’s business product, Soundtrack Your Brand, uses licensed music with the same costs.
Serruya decided to leave and start Tonada, a Stockholm-based company that skips licensing and creates original music, so brands own what they play and don’t pay licensing fees. And it just raised $3M in pre-seed funding to replace licensed music with AI-generated sound.
“Every brand deserves its own sound. Brands have a CMS for their website, a POS for their checkout, a CRM for their customers, and nothing for how their spaces actually feel. This round lets us build that layer at the pace the market is asking for. Music is the first surface. It is not the last,” Serruya says.
A problem that’s easy to overlook
Most brands don’t think much about background music. Usually, it’s just a playlist set to shuffle and left alone. But this can cost them money.
In a large study, HUI Research tracked 1.8 million transactions and found that music matched to the brand boosted sales by 9.1% compared to random popular songs. Random music actually did 4.3% worse than silence. Sometimes, no music is better than a bad playlist.
The licensing issue makes things even harder. Using a personal Spotify account in a shop is illegal in most places, and licensing groups often fine small businesses for it. Music ends up being a risk for brands that could benefit the most from using it well.
In 2024, the commercial background music market was worth $2.8B and is expected to grow to $5.4B by 2035, with a 6.13% annual growth rate. Existing companies rely on this growth, but Tonada believes AI will change the industry.
How Tonada works and who it’s up against
Tonada was founded in 2025 by Serruya and Jonathan Andersson, who was previously head of sales at Wolt. Both founders are former musicians. The company is based in Stockholm.
Tonada takes a brand’s visual identity, tone, and market position to create a unique, always-changing set of original tracks. These are streamed in real time across the brand’s locations.
There are no licensing agreements, no repeated loops, and no risk of sounding like the shop next door. Tonada already has paying customers in restaurants, hotels, wellness centres, retail stores, and co-working spaces in Scandinavia, DACH, and Singapore.
Its rival, Soundtrack Your Brand, a Swedish company that grew out of Spotify’s infrastructure, has raised $54.6M across seven rounds and uses licensed music. Meanwhile, Rockbot, backed by Google and Universal Music Group, serves almost 50,000 businesses in North America with a similar approach.
Both rely on licensing, but Tonada creates its own audio, which gives it a growing cost advantage as its catalogue expands.
The investors and what comes next
Antler led the $3M funding round, with Spintop Ventures, RTP Global, Triple A VC, and Karaoke Club also investing. Angel investors included Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch and a16z scout Dora Palfi Osika. This is Tonada’s first round of funding, and the money will be used for product development and expanding into new regions.
Tobias Bengtsdahl, general partner at Antler, says, “Tonada is one of those cases that builds both a better product for their brand clients and a superior experience for the end consumers. They’re building real infrastructure in a category with real-world impact that has been overlooked far too long. The founders’ combination of experience across AI, audio and retail is rare, and the early stage traction across regions is showing promise to be a global category winner.”
Erik Wenngren, partner at Spintop Ventures, adds: “This team understands both the technology and the creative craft of music, and it shows in the product customers love.”
Now, the question is whether $3M in pre-seed funding is enough to show that AI-generated sound can do what traditional music licensing never did: make every brand’s space sound unique.
