Photo Credit: GRAI
Ahead of its quick-approaching launch, AI-powered music startup GRAI has officially acquired social streaming platform Hangout.
Warsaw-headquartered GRAI reached out with word of the purchase today, about one month after licensing some two dozen AI patents from Universal Music. And evidently, additional deals yet are on the radar for the business, which scored a $9 million Khosla Ventures-led seed round this past April.
Enter the Hangout acquisition, which “has closed” and will see the selling company integrate its tech into GRAI. And GRAI, founded last year by former Vochi execs, “is launching soon” and has a waitlist in place, higher-ups indicated.
Time will tell what the debuting platform looks like and precisely how Hangout factors into the offering; the buyer’s formal release is light on concrete details in this department.
That said, Turntable FM-inspired Hangout upon launching in late 2024 had licensing pacts in place with the majors and Merlin; GRAI highlighted plans to continue “expanding the partnerships” at hand.
Meanwhile, Hangout founder Joseph Perla took to LinkedIn to tout GRAI as having “the perfect team to really take this to the Gen Alpha generations that have never experienced anything like records.”
“I built Hangout to fix what’s broken in online spaces,” Perla added in a statement. “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.”
And on the opposite side of the transaction, GRAI co-founder and president Andrei Avsievich noted the perceived commercial potential of social streaming in the AI era.
“I grew up backstage at an opera house where my grandfather sang, so music has always meant people to me,” Avsievich said. “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,” the Bulba Ventures founder finished.
Closer to 2026’s start, social music platform Hook – which, like GRAI, leverages AI and counts Khosla Ventures as a backer – announced a $10 million Series A. August then saw the startup secure a Universal Music licensing deal.
And before that, Stationhead, which is tailored for superfans but still specializes in social listening, merged with Mellomanic and added Universal Music as an investor.