GRAI, an AI music company headquartered in Warsaw, Poland, has acquired Hangout, the social music platform built by Turntable Labs and founded by Joseph Perla.
The deal, announced September 22, was structured as a merger, with GRAI Inc. acquiring the whole of Hangout’s parent company rather than its assets. TTFM Labs, Incorporated, which trades as Turntable Labs, is the surviving entity and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of GRAI.
GRAI’s AI licensing and backing#
In August, GRAI became one of the first two companies to license the AI music patents of Music IP Holdings, the entity backed by Universal Music Group. Music IP Holdings unveiled a portfolio of over 24 AI music patents on August 20, with Udio named as the other launch licensee.
Announcing that license, GRAI CEO and co-founder Ilya Liasun said the company was building a service “where music moves between people.”
- Founded in 2025, GRAI raised a USD $9 million seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC.
- GRAI was set up by the team behind Vochi, the AI video-editing app acquired by Pinterest, and is building what it calls a social streaming service for a younger generation.
Hangout’s social music model#
Hangout launched in November 2024 with a catalog of over 100 million tracks, licensed from Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Merlin. Users of Hangout build virtual rooms, known as Hangouts, where they take turns as DJ for friends and strangers.
Perla modeled the platform on Turntable.fm, the social music service he helped launch in 2011. Turntable.fm closed in December 2013. Perla revived the concept in 2021 with Turntable, and again in 2024 with Hangout.
Turntable Labs raised $8.2 million in seed funding in August 2024, in a round led by Founders Fund, Elizabeth Street Ventures, 468 Capital, and f7 Ventures. It also runs a second product, Turntable, which its website ties to listening parties, artist shows, and a Turntable Token.
In December 2025, Hangout added a generative AI feature called Turntable.AI, which lets users create a track from a text prompt. Perla said at the time that the platform had more than two million users. “We’re nearing the ChatGPT moment for music,” he said.
Leadership comments#
“I grew up backstage at an opera house where my grandfather sang, so music has always meant people to me,” said Andrei Avsievich, co-founder and President of GRAI. “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.”
“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,” said Joseph Perla, founder of Hangout. “Integrating our work into GRAI is how we keep that core belief in human connection moving forward.”
Perla joins GRAI as a board observer.
Next steps#
GRAI says it will maintain and grow Hangout’s deals with labels, publishers, and collecting societies. GRAI says the new product combines Hangout’s “deep insights into social listening behavior” with its own “tech and consumer product vision.”
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.” GRAI says its own service is launching soon, with a waitlist open at grai.fm.
