Tonada, the AI-generated sound platform for retail and hospitality, has today announced a $3M pre-seed round. The Stockholm-based AI startup aims to make high quality AI-generated audio available to every brand that owns a physical space.
The funding round was led by Antler, the world’s most active early-stage VC, and joined by Spintop Ventures, alongside RTP Global, Triple A VC and Karaoke Club. High profile angel investors also participated in the round, including Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, a16z scout Dora Palfi Osika, Ingrid Bojner, and Mattias Miksche.
Tonada is the operating system for how physical spaces sound, feel, and sell. Its proprietary generative platform turns a brand’s identity into a unique, ever-evolving catalogue of original, royalty-free tracks, streamed across physical locations and adapted in real time.
The company is already live with paying customers across restaurants, hotels, wellness, retail, and co-working spaces in Scandinavia, DACH, and Singapore.
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.
The cost of getting this wrong is measurable. In the largest commercial study of its kind, HUI Research tracked 1.8 million transactions and found that brand-matched music lifted sales by 9.1% over random popular music, while random popular hits performed 4.3% worse than no music at all. Ambience is one of the most commercially significant and least optimized layers in the physical world.
In fact, music is often an unexpected cost for brands, especially small independent retailers and hospitality companies. Many small businesses just play unlicensed music in their stores and incur significant fines from licensing organisations.
”Every brand deserves its own sound,” said Juan Manuel Serruya, Co-founder and CEO of Tonada. ”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.”
”Tonada is one of those cases that build 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.
“This team understands both the technology and the creative craft of music, and it shows in the product customers love. We’re very proud to back team Tonada.” said Erik Wenngren, Partner at Spintop Ventures.
Tonada was founded in 2025 by Juan Manuel Serruya (formerly Engineering Lead at Spotify) and Jonathan Andersson (formerly Head of Sales at Wolt). Both former musicians, the two co-founders bring deep domain expertise from the music industry and commercial experience scaling tech products across Europe.
About Tonada
Tonada is the operating system for how physical spaces sound, feel, and sell. Its proprietary generative platform turns each brand’s identity into a unique, evolving catalog of original, royalty-free tracks, streamed across physical locations and adapted in real time. Founded in 2026 and headquartered in Stockholm. Learn more at tonada.com.
About Antler
Antler is where founders come to go further, faster.
Antler is the world’s most active early-stage investor, backing exceptional people at the very start of their journey, and supporting them from inception to scale. Across 30 cities worldwide, including New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, Seoul, and Sydney, the firm helps founders remove the barriers to building by connecting them with world-class peers, validating business models, and providing initial capital. To date, Antler has backed more than 2,000 startups globally, including Lovable, Airalo, Peec.AI, Reebelo, Wrtn, and Benjamin.
About Spintop Ventures
Spintop Ventures is a Swedish early-stage venture capital firm investing in innovative, software-based technology companies from the Nordics. With a strong track record in enterprise software and deep-tech, Spintop supports founders in building scalable global businesses with sustainable impact.