Stockholm, Sweden. May 26, 2026.

Every brand deserves its own sound.

RTP Global and Vercel CEO back Tonada, the AI-generated sound platform for retail and hospitality

Founded by ex-Spotify, Wolt/DoorDash and Klarna operators, the Stockholm-based startup exits stealth today with paying customers across Scandinavia, DACH, and Singapore, and an investor roster of operators and music-industry veterans.

Every brand on earth spends years and millions designing how it looks. Almost no brand has ever seriously designed how it sounds. Physical spaces, restaurants, hotels, gyms, retail stores, co-working floors, still run on intuition when it comes to ambience: a licensed playlist someone picked once, set to shuffle, looped forever, identical to the place down the street.

Tonada, founded by Juan Manuel Serruya (formerly Engineering Lead at Spotify) and Jonathan Andersson (formerly Head of Sales at Wolt), is coming out of stealth today to change that. The company has paying customers across Scandinavia, DACH, and Singapore, spanning restaurants, hotels, nightlife, retail, and co-working, and is backed by an unusually concentrated group of operators and music-industry veterans, including Guillermo Rauch (Founder & CEO, Vercel), last.fm Founder Michael Breidenbrücker, RTP Global, Karaoke Club, a16z scout Dora Palfi Osika, Norrsken Launcher's Erik Engellau-Nilsson, and Tony Beltramelli (Head of AI Product at Miro), among others.

The opportunity is large and well-documented. Decades of research have shown that background music in physical spaces measurably shifts customer behavior: classic field studies have found that tempo alone can move retail sales by more than 30%, and that music shapes how long customers stay, what they order, and how they remember a brand. Yet ambience remains one of the least optimized layers in retail and hospitality, a problem of infrastructure as much as taste.

Every brand deserves its own sound

Tonada is the first company built end-to-end to deliver on that promise at scale. Its proprietary generative-music engine works with each brand to define its sonic identity, then produces a unique, ever-evolving catalog of original tracks that exists nowhere else and belongs to no one else. Because every track is generated specifically for the customer, the catalog is fully owned and 100% royalty-free out of the box.

What makes the product different is the adaptive layer underneath. Tonada integrates with the systems that already run a physical space, point-of-sale, occupancy and foot-traffic signals, and ambient inputs like time of day, weather, and local events, so the soundscape reacts in real time to what is actually happening in each location. The same space can sound like a different version of itself across morning, afternoon, and Friday night, in Stockholm versus Singapore.

Because Tonada is built as infrastructure, the same plumbing that pipes audio out also pipes insight back in, giving brands a way to measure, for the first time, what their spaces actually feel like and how that maps to revenue.

"Every brand deserves its own sound," said Juan Manuel Serruya, Co-founder and CEO of Tonada. "For decades, ambience has been the most under-engineered part of the physical world. 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. We're building the infrastructure layer that sits between AI-generated audio and every physical space on earth. Music is the first surface. It is not the last."

"What surprised us most in stealth wasn't that brands wanted better music. It's how quickly they wanted everything around the music," said Jonathan Andersson, Co-founder and CCO of Tonada. "The conversation stops being about playlists. It becomes: what does this brand sound like at noon versus 8 p.m., on a rainy Tuesday versus a sold-out Friday, in Stockholm versus Singapore? When you can answer that, and prove it lifts dwell time, basket size, and brand recall, you're not selling music anymore. You're selling the operating layer for the space itself."

About Tonada

Tonada is the operating system for how physical spaces sound, feel, and sell. It is the infrastructure layer between AI-generated audio and every physical space on earth. 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.

Press contact

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