Juan Manuel Serruya spent years as an engineering lead at Spotify, which gave him a front-row seat to a problem Spotify had no commercial reason to fix. The café playing music off a personal account it is not licensed to use. The boutique that gets a letter from a collection society for doing the same. Spotify sells personal listening, and its business version, licensed and pricier, still routes money to the labels either way. The misuse was not Spotify’s problem to solve, because solving it sold nothing. So Serruya left and founded Tonada, a Stockholm company that just raised €2.6 million in pre-seed funding to make brands their own music instead of renting someone else’s.

The round was led by Antler, with Spintop Ventures, RTP Global, Triple A VC and Karaoke Club participating, alongside angels including Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch. The pitch is built on an absence that sounds obvious once stated: a modern brand has a content system for its website and a point-of-sale system for its checkout and nothing at all for how its physical space sounds. So the space defaults to a playlist someone set to shuffle once, years ago, and never touched again, possibly on an account that is not even licensed for commercial use. Tonada generates original, royalty-free tracks tuned to a brand’s identity and streams them across all its locations, with no labels, no collection societies, and no risk that the shop down the street is playing the identical loop.

The number that turns ambience into a balance-sheet line

The case for caring rests on research Serruya likes to cite, and it is sharper than the usual ambience hand-waving. A study by HUI Research tracked 1.8 million transactions and found that music matched to a brand’s identity lifted sales by 9.1 per cent against random popular songs, and, more damning, that random popular songs performed 4.3 per cent worse than playing no music at all. Read that second figure twice. It means a large share of retailers are not merely wasting an opportunity; they are running audio that actively costs them money, paying for a streaming subscription that depresses their own sales. That is either a tragedy or a market, depending on whether you are the shopkeeper or the founder, and Tonada has decided it is a market.

The mechanism matters to the economics, because it is what separates this from the incumbent model. Licensing a catalogue means paying, per play, per location, forever, with the cost scaling up as you grow. Generating owned audio inverts that curve: once the model exists, more tracks and more locations get cheaper per unit, not more expensive, and the brand owns the output outright rather than renting it. Owned audio compounds; licensed audio meters. For a chain with hundreds of locations, that difference is not aesthetic, it is a recurring cost line that either grows with the business or shrinks against it.

There is already a Swede in this chair

Tonada is not walking into an empty room, and the incumbent is uncomfortably well-matched. Soundtrack Your Brand, also Swedish and also descended from Spotify’s infrastructure, has raised $54.6 million and built a real business doing in-store music for brands, and it still licenses its catalogue rather than generating it. So the contest is not generation versus nothing; it is generation versus a funded, established licensing player with a head start and existing contracts. Tonada’s wager is specific: that generation beats licensing the moment the generated catalogue is large and good enough, because the cost structures diverge permanently in the generator’s favour and the licensor cannot follow without cannibalising the catalogue deals that are its whole business.

The bear case is the obvious one for any generative-audio company at pre-seed. “Good enough” is doing heavy lifting in that sentence, and a brand that cares about its identity may balk at music with no human artist behind it, or find the generated tracks competent but characterless in a way a curated playlist is not. Taste is hard to automate, and the incumbent gets to point at a real catalogue of real songs. What Tonada has to show against that is traction in places that already pay: the company is live with paying customers across Scandinavia, the DACH region and Singapore, which is a long commercial reach for a company this young. An engineer noticed, from inside the streaming giant, that the sound of a physical space was the one branded surface nobody owned. He left to sell it back to them. The question now is whether a generated sound can carry a brand the way a chosen one does, and the shops paying for it are the ones answering.