chroma, a startup working to create a new kind of audiovisual entertainment specifically for mobile devices, now adds a Twitter co-founder to its board. The company announced today that Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone, a former angel investor in Chroma along with the founders of Pinterest, will join the company’s board of directors to contribute expertise in areas including design, product development, filming and scaling marks.
Stone, an early Google employee, worked on the Blogger team after its acquisition, before helping co-found Twitter in 2006.
He stayed with Twitter for several years as the company grew to be adopted by millions of users around the world. In 2011, when Twitter reached the 100 million active brand of users, the entrepreneur went looking for new ventures with Obvious Corporation, a start-up incubator and investment vehicle that had included Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and former Twitter executive Jason Goldman. The company most notably incubated the Medium blogging platform. However, in 2013, Stone and the others shifted their focus to individual startups. For Stone, that led to the creation of Jelly, a Q&A app and search engine that was later sold to Pinterest.
In 2017, Stone publicly announced that he would return to Twitter to lead strategic vision, brand and culture, where he remained until 2021.
Over the years, Stone has also endorsed a number of companies, including Square, Pinterest, Slack, Nest, Intercom, and Beyond Meat, where she now chairs the Nominating and Governance Committee.
Stone said that what initially attracted him to the Swedish audiovisual company Chroma was its CEO and founder, Andreas Pihlström, whom he met through a presentation by Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. Pihlström had previously worked as a creative director, design consultant, designer, and prototyper at Pinterest, Beats Music, and VSCO.
The two hit it off and started having monthly calls after Stone’s angel investment.
“It’s really about finding people you enjoy working with and spending time with, and sharing ideas back and forth,” Stone said.
The Chroma team had a variety of ideas, but ultimately landed on AV technologies and their intersection with music and sound.
As Stone explains, the idea was to change the nature of music and sound and make it a more interactive and immersive experience. In practice, this means dynamic, tactile images that create a sound-driven digital space that users can explore and interact with for a variety of purposes.
The debut product to prove this concept came out last year, through a partnership with music artist Arca to create an iOS app called Eternal light. The app offers an audiovisual experience to explore the music of the Venezuelan producer, DJ, singer and songwriter in a “meditative digital space,” the company said. Users fly through a virtual world, interacting with their music and sounds as part of the journey.
But this doesn’t show the full potential of the technology, which could have a variety of use cases, some of which Chroma is now exploring, demonstrating other ways users can interact with audio and sound, whether it’s for play, meditate, relax, music composition, and more. While the company plans to launch a product on mobile first, Stone thinks the technology could get even more interesting when Apple launches its own VR/AR headset.
“I think it will lend itself very well to the metaverse team when it becomes more ubiquitous. But I can also watch it on my Apple TV. I would love to have it there. Anywhere there is great sound and visuals,” he added. “Mobile [first] It’s just because that’s what everyone has.”
Founded in 2021, headquartered in Stockholm Chroma last year raised $5.4 million in seed funding (€5.1 million) from venture capital firms Singular and Adjacent, Berlin angel syndicate SpotiAngels, as well as other individual investors, including Stone and Pinterest co-founders Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann. Chroma had previously raised €1.6 million in pre-seed funding.
As a board member, Stone expects to meet with the startup several times a month, in addition to board meetings. He says that with his angel investments, he usually considers himself an advisor, which means he’s open to phone calls from the founders, but won’t call the company unless they want him to. Chroma did it.
“These guys are brimming with different ideas [at Chroma]. So the challenge has been to scale it down because it’s a small team and to do something they don’t need to do a ton of things,” Stone said. For now, the focus is on adding a sensory experience to the sound.
“The big picture is like this ‘sound game’ idea. . . It’s interactive. It’s changing the music of nature to be more 3D rich, but it’s also visual and . . . you can do things to it,” Stone hinted.
The board seat isn’t the only thing Stone has in the works, as the businessman says he’s been “mulling over” something else for himself with a small group of people. So far, the project is self-funded and hasn’t been officially launched, so he’s keeping the details under wraps. However, Stone says that he is particularly interested in the emerging AI space and the use of AI as a tool in particular.
He says he hasn’t been particularly interested in some of the other newer tech trends, like web3 or some aspects of the metaverse.
“He [web3] culture doesn’t appeal to me. There’s something weird about that to me,” Stone explained. On the metaverse: “I don’t want a dystopian future where kids are in the room wearing a scuba mask all day. I don’t want that to happen. That doesn’t feel right to me,” she adds.
“Biz brings a wealth of technology and design experience to our table. Together, we will pave the way to the future of sound: combining excellence in the digital space with a vision of the future to change the paradigm of music,” Pihlström said in a statement.
