Our Story

Music is one of the last
truly human things.

We are building a sanctuary for it — a platform where every track is made by a human being, every artist is paid fairly, and every listener can trust what they hear.

Our Founding Principle

"Music is not content. It is connection. The moment a streaming platform stops being able to guarantee that a human being made what you are hearing, it stops being a music platform. It becomes a content machine. We are not building a content machine."

— Sonveil Founding Principle · Minneapolis, MN · 2026

Why We Exist

Streaming broke its promise to artists and listeners.

In 2025, independent artists earned an average of $0.004 per stream on Spotify. An artist needed 250,000 streams to earn one month of minimum wage. Meanwhile, Spotify's Discover Weekly — the feature that built listener trust for a decade — began filling with AI-generated tracks that listeners had no way to filter out.

The platforms that were supposed to democratize music instead created a two-tier system: a small number of superstars, and millions of working musicians earning near nothing. And now they are flooding the catalog with content that was not made by anyone at all.

Sonveil exists to fix both problems at once. Human verification for listeners. Fair pay for artists. One platform. One promise.

$0.004
Spotify per-stream rate
$0.015
Sonveil guaranteed rate
4–8
AI tracks per Discover Weekly
0%
AI in Sonveil's catalog

The Road Here

Built in Minneapolis.
Built for musicians everywhere.

Sonveil was founded in 2026 by a team that had watched the streaming ecosystem erode artist livelihoods for over a decade. The final straw was not a business decision — it was a personal one. When AI-generated music started appearing in playlists indistinguishable from human recordings, we knew the window to build an alternative was closing.

We started with a question: what would a streaming platform look like if it were designed first for the integrity of the music, and second for the business? Everything about Sonveil — the HumanVerified™ pipeline, the FairWave royalty model, the Serendipity Algorithm — comes from that question.

✦ Timeline
Q1 2026 — Sonveil founded in Minneapolis, MN. HumanVerified™ detection engine begins development.
Q2 2026 — FairWave Artist Program launches. Waitlist opens. First 4,800+ subscribers join.
Q3 2026 — Browser extension launches for Chrome and Safari. Sonveil Weekly begins weekly delivery.
Q1 2027 — Full streaming platform launches for iOS and Android. Seed round closes.

What We Believe

Three principles that drive every decision.

◎
Human first, always.

Every product decision starts with one question: does this serve human artists and human listeners? If the answer is no, we do not build it. There are no exceptions for growth metrics or engagement numbers.

✦
Radical transparency.

Artists see exactly what they earned, when, and from which listeners. Listeners see why a track was recommended and its AI probability score. No black boxes. No dark patterns. Ever.

⨉
Fair is a floor, not a ceiling.

$0.015 per stream is our guaranteed minimum, not a target we optimize down from. As Sonveil grows, artist rates will rise with it. The platform succeeds when artists succeed.

The Team

Built by people who care about music.

M
Mahmoud Dakowa
Founder & CEO

Founder of Thrice M Financial and Sonveil. Passionate about building systems that pay people fairly for their creative work.

+
You?
Open Roles

We are looking for engineers, curators, and artist relations leads who believe in what we are building. Get in touch.

+
You?
Open Roles

Head of Artist Relations, Lead Detection Engineer, and more. We are a small team building something big. Join us.

Hear what human music sounds like.

Join 4,800+ listeners already on the Sonveil waitlist.

Join the Waitlist Apply as an Artist