Mixy

Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

Founders Jonah and Joe met as teenage tech YouTubers in 2008 and started building iPhone apps together in 2009. They began Mixy at the end of 2024 and iterated prototypes publicly on TikTok, gathering over 350k pre-orders. The app launched June 19th, reaching #1 in Music and #3 overall in the App Store, and has since had more than 1.5M users create over 15M mashups.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

The founders point to the growing volume of derivative musical works whose source artists often go uncredited, a problem they say generative AI has accelerated as music is trained on and re-uploaded without attribution or payment. Mixy has fans manipulate and share versions of songs while automatically crediting the source track, since the platform owns the creation layer, and pairs this with a social network for playback and discovery. They say they took it on because of their interest in music and their background in creative tools and consumer social.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

The founders aim to make Mixy the platform for music in an era of derivative works, comparing its relationship to music with TikTok's relationship to YouTube. They want to set licensing and attribution standards so that every derivative creation—mashup, remix, AI variation, or fan edit—routes automatic credit and revenue back to the original artist, treating songs as evolving works rather than static recordings.