The co-founder of Twitter and Medium has joined the board of Chroma, a startup developing audiovisual entertainment tailored for mobile devices.
Biz Stone was an early angel investor in the Stockholm, Sweden-based firm alongside founders of Pinterest. The firm had raised $5.4 million in seed funding from venture capital firms and individual investors including Pinterest co-founders Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann.
As a member of the board at Chroma, TechCrunch reported Stone will lend his acumen across product development, design, filmmaking and scaling brands.
The entrepreneur said he was interested in the Sweden-based Chroma after meeting its CEO and founder Andreas Pihlström through Sharp and as “the two hit it and began to have monthly calls” following Stone’s initial angel investments.
Pihlström’s background runs the gamut from creative director and designer to “prototyper” at Pinterest, Beats Music and VSCO, according to TechCrunch.
“Biz brings a wealth of experience in technology and design to our table,” Pihlström said in a statement. “Together, we’ll paved a path to the future of sound: combining excellence in the digital space with forward thinking to shift the paradigm of music.”
For Stone, it was “really about finding people I enjoy working with and spending time with — and bouncing ideas back and forth. He found that at Chroma, which focuses on audiovisual technologies and their intersection with music and sound.
Chroma’s first product was iOS app Lux Aeterna, via a partnership with music artist Arca, which offered an “audiovisual experience for exploring music from the Venezuelan producer, DJ, singer and songwriter in a “meditative digital space,” the company said. Similar to Metaverse and web3 concepts, the users of the app enter a virtual world, where they are immersed in music.
As the company plans to first launch a product on mobile devices, Stone believes the technology could be take off if timed with the release of Apple’s VR/AR headset.
“I think it’ll lend itself really well to the metaverse equipment when that’s more ubiquitous,” Stone said. “But I can also see it on my Apple TV. I would love to have it on there. Anywhere there’s great sound and visuals. Mobile [first] is just because that’s what everybody has.”
The company’s conceptual “idea was about changing the nature of music and sound and making it a more interactive and immersive experience. In practice, this involves touchable, dynamic visuals that create a sound-driven digital space that users can explore and interact with for a variety of purposes.”
