Hayden Housen
| Hayden Housen | |
| Occupation | Co-founder and CTO of Sonauto |
|---|---|
| Known for | Sonauto, AI music editor |
| Education | Cornell University (Computer Science) |
Hayden Housen is an American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Sonauto, an artificial intelligence music editor that converts prompts, lyrics, or melodies into full songs in any style. Sonauto participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.[1]
Early life and education
Housen attended Somers High School, where he began exploring artificial intelligence and deep learning through independent research into automatic classroom lecture summarization. During this period he also developed a neural text summarization system that accumulated over 430 stars on GitHub, demonstrating early community interest in his technical work.[2]
Housen went on to study computer science at Cornell University. While a freshman, he co-authored research on paraphrase identification with Dr. Ser-Nam Lim; that work was accepted and published at the NeurIPS 2022 conference. As a sophomore, he conducted research on unsupervised object discovery under Dr. Kevin Ellis.[3]
Career
Before co-founding Sonauto, Housen held software engineering internships at multiple technology companies. He interned at Vocode (YC W23), a developer platform for voice AI, where he worked on the company's FastAPI backend and dashboard. He also interned on the machine learning team at Ada, a customer service automation company, where he improved intent-classification accuracy by eight percentage points using a small fraction of production data.[4]
Housen co-founded Sonauto alongside Ryan Tremblay. The company, based in San Francisco, develops an AI-powered music editing platform that allows users to generate complete songs from text prompts, written lyrics, or hummed melodies. The platform supports a wide range of musical styles; the company describes one representative use case in which a user can create an original birthday song performed in the style of Frank Sinatra within minutes.[5] Sonauto was founded in 2023 and accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, placing it among a cohort of early-stage companies backed by one of Silicon Valley's most prominent startup accelerators.[6][7] As of its most recent public profile, Sonauto operates as a seed-stage company.[8]
In addition to his professional work, Housen has published write-ups and guides for cybersecurity capture-the-flag challenges and has participated in the Advent of Code annual programming competition for over six consecutive years.[9]
References
- ↑ "Sonauto – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Hayden Housen". 'haydenhousen.com}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Hayden Housen". 'haydenhousen.com}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Hayden Housen". 'haydenhousen.com}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Sonauto". 'Sonauto}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Sonauto – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Sonauto Company Profile". 'Tracxn}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Sonauto Company Profile". 'Tracxn}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Hayden Housen". 'haydenhousen.com}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.