AI music firm GRAI acquires social platform Hangout
GRAI, an AI music company backed by Khosla Ventures, has acquired the social music platform Hangout in a merger deal.
AI music company GRAI has acquired the social music platform Hangout. The deal, structured as a merger, was announced on September 22, a GRAI spokesperson told Music Business Worldwide.
GRAI Inc. Acquired the entirety of Hangout's parent company. The surviving entity, TTFM Labs, Incorporated, which trades as Turntable Labs, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of GRAI.
Hangout founder Joseph Perla joins GRAI as a board observer. Perla launched Hangout in November 2024 with a catalog of over 100 million tracks licensed from Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Merlin.
The companies behind the deal
GRAI was founded in 2025 by the team behind the AI video-editing app Vochi, which was acquired by Pinterest. The Warsaw-based company has raised a $9 million seed funding round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC.
In August, GRAI became one of the first two companies to license the AI music patent portfolio from Music IP Holdings (MIH), an entity backed by Universal Music Group. The other licensee was Udio.
Turntable Labs, which built Hangout, raised $8.2 million in seed funding in August 2024. The round was led by Founders Fund, Elizabeth Street Ventures, 468 Capital, and f7 Ventures. The company also runs a separate product called Turntable, which is used for listening parties and artist shows.
Vision for a social streaming future
Executives from both companies framed the merger as a union of shared beliefs about music's social future. "Joseph and his team built a product that showed how deeply people want to gather around music and do more with it than press play," said Andrei Avsievich, co-founder and President of GRAI.
Avsievich added, "We see it exactly the same way. The future of streaming is social and co-creative."
Perla explained his motivation for building Hangout. I built Hangout to fix what’s broken in online spaces, he said. We wanted to recreate that feeling of sitting on a bedroom floor passing around records, turning music back into a collective experience.
He stated that integrating Hangout's work into GRAI is how they keep a belief in human connection moving forward.
Product integration and user base
GRAI says the combined product will merge Hangout's insights into social listening behavior with its own technology and consumer product vision. The company pledges to maintain and grow Hangout's existing licensing deals with labels, publishers, and collecting societies.
On the Hangout platform, users build virtual rooms called 'Hangouts' where they take turns acting as DJ for friends and strangers. The platform is a revival of the concept behind Turntable.fm, a service Perla helped launch in 2011 and which closed in 2013.
In December 2025, Hangout added a generative AI feature named Turntable.AI, allowing users to create a track from a text prompt. Perla told Billboard at the time that the platform had more than two million users, claiming, We’re nearing the ChatGPT moment for music.
GRAI says it is building its service with the music industry rather than around it, so that every play and every change pays the artists and songwriters behind the song. The company's own service is launching soon, with a waitlist open at grai.fm.
