GRAI acquires Hangout in merger to build social streaming service

GRAI has acquired Hangout, the social music platform developed by Turntable Labs, in a deal intended to help build a social streaming service centred on shared listening and creation. The transaction has closed, although financial terms were not disclosed. The deal was structured as a merger rather than an asset purchase. TTFM Labs, Incorporated, which trades as Turntable Labs, survives as a wholly owned subsidiary of GRAI, according to Music Business Worldwide. GRAI said it would maintain and expand Hangout’s partnerships with labels, publishers and collecting societies. Its planned product will combine Hangout’s understanding of social-listening behaviour with GRAI’s technology and consumer-product vision, with the aim of making music move between people. Andrei Avsievich of GRAI described streaming’s future as “social and co-creative.” Joseph Perla, Hangout’s founder, is joining GRAI as a board observer. Hangout launched in November 2024 as a virtual listening community built around discovery through human recommendation. Users can invite friends into virtual rooms called Hangouts, take turns playing DJ, chat, use customisable avatars and gather on virtual dance floors. The service is available on the web, iOS and Android. At launch, its licensed catalogue contained more than 100 million tracks from Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Merlin. Perla said in December that Hangout had more than two million users. The platform had also begun adding generative AI. Its Turntable.AI feature lets users make tracks from text prompts, with a choice of track lengths; Hangout said it had licensed music from thousands of record labels to train its proprietary music model. Perla said at the time that the service was approaching a “ChatGPT moment for music.” Hangout grew out of the team behind Turntable.fm, a social-listening service launched in 2011 that shut down at the end of 2013 amid licensing issues. Perla revived the concept through Turntable in 2021 and Hangout in 2024. Turntable Labs raised $8.2 million in seed financing in August 2024. GRAI, which is based in Warsaw, was founded in 2025 by the team behind Vochi, the AI video-editing app acquired by Pinterest. It raised seed funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC; TechCrunch reported the round was worth $9 million. GRAI said its service, which has a waitlist at grai.fm, is launching soon.