Why we invested in Sonura

Producers spend hours hunting for sounds when they should be making music

AI music has mostly gone after a different problem. One-shot generators turn a prompt into a finished song, and more than half of the tracks uploaded to Deezer each day are now AI-generated. Working producers don't want that. In Tracklib's 2024 survey, a quarter of producers used AI, and only 3% of those used it to make whole songs. Most used it for stem separation and individual parts.

Sonura generates sounds producers can control, inside the tools they already use

Sonura has two products. Sonura Studio is a generative audio workstation in the browser, with generation, mixing, stem separation and sound isolation in one place. Sonura Flow is a plugin that brings the same generation into every major DAW.

The output is discrete, editable stems that match the project's key and tempo. A prompt enhancer reads the session context, so the first result is as close to usable as possible. The producer keeps what works, regenerates only the part that doesn't and refines from there, which is how production already works. Sonura uses only commercially licensable models, so producers can release what they make. Its users include artists with millions of streams and sync composers who score for global brands.

A producer who learned to build, and a music marketer who still makes records

Kindred Salway (CEO) has made music most of his life. He has produced for dozens of artists, designed sound for radio and co-founded a dance music label. At 19 he left music school to build software, and he has shipped consumer products to millions of users since, including leading UI/UX at the AI inference platform Prodia and heading product at a profitable AI entertainment platform. He built the first version of Sonura in four days and put a payment link on it straight away.

Blue Bookhard (COO) has worked where music and technology meet for a decade. He led creator marketing at Snapchat, headed pop at TIDAL and drove partner marketing at Google. He is also an artist: one of his tracks has six million streams and was synced in Step Up. He runs Sonura's go-to-market and partnerships.

Why we invested: the team came together and the product got sharper

Kindred came into the residency with a live product, paying users and one obvious gap: a single person carrying product, engineering, growth and support. Within a fortnight of Blue joining, the team had shipped the DAW plugin and producers were paying from inside their sessions. Since we invested they have kept moving. Plugin marketplaces became a sales channel and search took over from social as the main source of new users. The positioning is sharper too: anyone can make professional music, with full creative control and commercial ownership of what they make.

Today Sonura's generation runs on third-party models, and the model companies and the big sample platforms are all moving into music. "AI music" is also a contested label with producers and rights holders. Sonura's answer is control: a product for producers who want to keep making the decisions.

At Antler, we back exceptional founders from day zero. We're proud to partner with Kindred and Blue as they build the AI tools producers will keep using.