Tonada, a Stockholm-based AI-generated sound platform for retail and hospitality, has today announced a €2.6 million ($3 million) pre-Seed round as it aims to make high-quality AI-generated audio available to every brand with a physical space.
The funding round was led by Antler, with Spintop Ventures, RTP Global, Triple A VC and Karaoke Club participating. High-profile angel investors also took part, including Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, a16z scout Dora Palfi Osika, Ingrid Bojner, and Mattias Miksche.
“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,” said Juan Manuel Serruya, co-founder and CEO of Tonada.
Founded in 2025 by Juan Manuel Serruya (formerly the engineering lead at Spotify) and Jonathan Andersson (formerly the head of sales at Wolt), Tonada is an operating system for how physical spaces sound, feel, and sell.
The company states that its proprietary generative platform turns a brand’s identity into an “ever-evolving” catalogue of original, royalty-free tracks, streamed across physical locations and adapted in real time.
“Whilst brands are used to spending millions on visual branding, how brands sound is often forgotten. Instead of crafting a deliberately designed sonic identity, most brands just use a licensed playlist someone picked once, set to shuffle, looped forever, identical to the place down the street,” Tonada mentioned in the press release.
The Swedish startup cited HUI Research, which tracked 1.8 million transactions and found that brand-matched music increased sales by 9.1% compared with random popular music, while random popular hits performed 4.3% worse than no music at all.
Tonada also pointed out that many small businesses play unlicensed music in their stores, resulting in hefty fines from licensing organisations.
The company claims its music is royalty-free because every track is original and fully owned by Tonada, with no separate rights holders or collection societies to pay. The customer’s subscription covers everything.
Explaining how Tonada differs from Soundtrack or other business music services, the company emphasises that it doesn’t license existing music; it generates original soundtracks using AI, tailored specifically to the brand.
“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,” said Tobias Bengtsdahl, General Partner at Antler.
The company is already live with paying customers across restaurants, hotels, wellness, retail, and co-working spaces in Scandinavia, DACH, and Singapore.
Source: EU-Startups
