TikTok veterans raise $11M for Sonilo, an AI that writes music and sound effects to match your video

Sonilo just raised $11 million to make AI music that follows your video, cut by cut.

The San Francisco startup was founded by people from TikTok’s AI and music teams. B Capital led the round and Redpoint took part, Variety reported in an exclusive on October 8, 2026.

The pitch: you upload the footage, and Sonilo writes the music and sound effects to fit it.

Who is behind Sonilo, the video-to-music startup from TikTok veterans

3 of Sonilo’s 4 leaders came out of TikTok:

• Shawn Song, CEO and co-founder, trained at Carnegie Mellon and led multimodal AI work at TikTok.
• Alex Yin, CTO, worked alongside Song at TikTok and holds a doctorate in computer music from the University of York.
• Keli Li, COO, built and ran TikTok’s global music operation, with a background in rights deals with the music business.
• Trista Taylor, CMO, runs product and the market launch, and has helped build consumer AI apps that made a16z’s Top 50 rankings.

The money pays for the computing power to scale Sonilo’s models. Sonilo also wants to grow with creators and developer platforms, and build out its music licensing business.

“We believe generative audio will become an essential part of the AI-native video stack,” said Daisy Cai, general partner at B Capital, which manages more than $9 billion.

How Sonilo’s video-to-music AI works

Sonilo calls its core tech the Sound World Model. It links what the model sees in a video to what it generates and when. So it reads the movement and the emotional shifts in your clip and builds the audio for that footage, which means no trimming a finished song to fit.

You can upload a clip, type a description, or do both.

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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.

Sonilo is built for short-form video, short dramas, AI video apps and production teams. It also does AI dubbing with lip-sync, so a studio can translate a video into another language without fixing it by hand in post.

You’ll find it in other tools already. Sonilo runs as a native node in ComfyUI, and the AI creator aggregator TapNow signed on as a distribution partner.

In July, Sonilo launched Sound Effects 1.0 and claimed the lead on 12 of 15 Movie Gen tests for video-to-sound-effects. That’s Sonilo’s own benchmark claim, and nobody has checked it independently.

Bigger names already sell sound for video. ElevenLabs Flows already syncs speech, effects and music to video on one canvas, and Adobe opened Firefly’s sound effects generator to everyone in August.

Sonilo’s training data: Shutterstock first, publishing and master deals next

Sonilo says its models learn from licensed music. The first partner is Shutterstock, which licensed its music catalog to train the Sonilo v1.0 model, announced on May 11, 2026.

Artists and rights owners get licensing fees plus a share of revenue, Sonilo told Variety. It is also wrapping up publishing and master recording deals with “major rights organizations”, and expects them to close within weeks. It hasn’t named them yet.

Licensed training is the selling point across the market now. Suno pitches its new models the same way, and Suno v6 launched on September 9 with Warner, BMG and Believe as partners.

One thing to know before you publish anything: a licensed training set doesn’t make your export commercial. On Sonilo’s pricing page, the license depends on your plan:

• Free gives you 2,000 credits every 2 weeks, about 7 short soundtracks, with preview exports for non-commercial use only.
• Pro costs $11.99 a month billed yearly, or $20 month to month, and adds the commercial license and a license certificate.
• Premium costs $23.99 a month billed yearly, or $40 month to month, and extends the license to film, TV, broadcast and studio games.

The consumer app is set to launch in the fourth quarter of 2026.