Photo Credit: Sonilo
AI audio company Sonilo announces an $11 million funding round led by B Capital with participation from Redpoint. The funds will help scale operations.
Sonilo, a generative audio company that builds proprietary video-native music and sound models, has announced an $11 million funding round led by B Capital, with participation from Redpoint. The company will use the funding for compute infrastructure to scale model performance, go-to-market expansion across creator and developer platforms, and grow its music licensing.
The core of Sonilo’s platform is its Sound World Model, a proprietary multimodal AI system that connects video understanding, audio generation, and temporal alignment. Rather than treating music and sound effects as isolated assets, the model reads the timing, movement, and emotional arc of a scene to generate audio that belongs to that specific story.
Creators can generate a synchronized, commercially ready soundtrack by dropping in a video, describing what they want in text, or a combination of the two. Sonilo’s model development is built around the creator’s workflow rather than industry benchmarks, a philosophy the team developed over years of building recommendation and generation systems at platform scale.
“Almost every audio-generation experience starts with a text prompt. You have to describe the music you want, line it up to the exact moments in your videos, and find the perfect sound effects, which can take hours for one piece of content,” said Shawn Song, CEO and co-founder of Sonilo. “We built Sonilo to understand the visual story. You give us the footage, and Sonilo understands what’s happening frame by frame, including the pacing, emotion, and story, and generates music and sound effects that naturally fit the scene. We believe the future of video isn’t just about generating better pictures but making those worlds feel real through audio that fits perfectly.”
Building such a workflow requires more than audio generation and takes multimodal AI research, music licensing expertise, and products designed around how creators work. Sonilo’s founding team aims to bring these capabilities together.
CEO Shawn Song is a CMU-trained researcher and former multimodal AI tech lead at TikTok, while CTO Alex Yin, who holds a PhD in Computer Music from the University of York, worked alongside Song at TikTok. COO Keli Li, who built and led global music at TikTok, brings deep experience in music licensing and industry partnerships. CMO Trista Taylor has helped incubate consumer AI apps and leads Sonilo’s product and go-to-market strategy.
“We believe generative audio will become an essential part of the AI-native video stack. Sonilo stands out because its multimodal technology gives creators two ways to generate music and sound effects: describe what they want in text or provide a video and let the model create audio that fits the scene,” said Daisy Cai, General Partner at B Capital. “That model-native approach, combined with Shawn’s deep expertise in multimodal music generation and the team’s focus on the creator workflow, gives Sonilo the opportunity to define a new category in generative media. We’re excited to support the team as they build the audio layer for the next generation of video.”
Sonilo’s platform also offers AI dubbing with synchronized lip-syncing, enabling short-drama and content studios to localize video across languages without manual post-production. Early distribution partners include AI creator aggregator TapNow and ComfyUI.
The company is also building its commercial music infrastructure around licensed source material, with Shutterstock as an early licensing partner. Crucially, Sonilo’s models are trained on licensed music datasets, with licensing fees and revenue share flowing to rights holders and artists. Sonilo is finalizing master recording and publishing deals with major rights organizations, with agreements expected to close in the coming weeks. The company plans to launch a consumer app in Q4, bringing its video-to-music generation technology directly to individual creators.