GRAI has acquired Hangout FM, the social music platform developed by members of the team behind Turntable.fm, as the AI music company builds a new social streaming service centered on collaborative music discovery.
The acquisition has closed, and GRAI plans to continue and expand Hangout’s relationships with record labels, publishers, and collecting societies.
GRAI is combining Hangout’s social listening experience with its AI technology and consumer product development capabilities.
The company is developing its service around the idea that streaming has made access to music easier while increasingly shifting listening toward individualized algorithmic experiences.
Hangout was created to provide a more collective listening environment where users could discover and experience music with others.
GRAI intends to build on that concept through a platform where music can move among users and where AI technology can support social and co-creative experiences.
The company is also developing the platform in collaboration with the music industry. GRAI said its model is designed so plays and modifications continue to generate compensation for the artists and songwriters behind the music.
In August 2026, GRAI became one of the first two companies to license patents from Music IP Holdings covering the use of recorded music with artificial intelligence, including authorization and payment processes.
GRAI was founded in 2025 by members of the team behind Vochi, an AI video-editing application acquired by Pinterest.
The company has raised seed funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC and plans to launch its social music service following the Hangout acquisition.
KEY QUOTES:
“I grew up backstage at an opera house where my grandfather sang, so music has always meant people to me. 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. We see it exactly the same way. The future of streaming is social and co-creative. It just needed two things: the demand and the technology. With today’s AI, it now has both.”
Andrei Avsievich, Co-Founder and President of GRAI
“I built Hangout to fix what’s broken in online spaces. We wanted to recreate that feeling of sitting on a bedroom floor passing around records, turning music back into a collective experience. Integrating our work into GRAI is how we keep that core belief in human connection moving forward.”
Joseph Perla, Founder of Hangout
