AI music company GRAI has acquired Hangout, the social music platform built by Turntable.fm co-creator Joseph Perla, the company announced Tuesday.
The deal has closed. GRAI says it will keep and expand the partnerships Hangout built with labels, publishers and collecting societies, and fold Hangout's social listening work into its own streaming service — which has not launched yet.
The deal was structured as a merger, with GRAI Inc. acquiring the whole of Hangout's parent company rather than its assets. TTFM Labs, which trades as Turntable Labs, survives as a wholly owned subsidiary of GRAI. Perla joins GRAI as a board observer. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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 build virtual rooms where they take turns as DJ for friends and strangers. In December 2025, the platform added a generative AI feature called Turntable.AI, and Perla said at the time that Hangout had more than two million users. The company said it had licensed music from "thousands" of record labels to train the model behind the feature.
Hangout was Perla's third run at the same idea. He modeled it on Turntable.fm, the service he helped launch in 2011, which closed in December 2013; he revived the concept in 2021 as Turntable and again in 2024 as Hangout. The original service ran into licensing problems and was forced to exclude users outside the U.S. before shutting down. Turntable Labs raised $8.2 million in seed funding in August 2024, led by Founders Fund, Elizabeth Street Ventures, 468 Capital, and f7 Ventures.
"I built Hangout to fix what's broken in online spaces," Perla said in the announcement. "We wanted to recreate that feeling of sitting on a bedroom floor passing around records, turning music back into a collective experience."
GRAI, headquartered in Warsaw, was founded in 2025 by the team behind Vochi, the AI video-editing app acquired by Pinterest. It came out of stealth in April with a $9 million seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC. Its early apps focus on letting users remix and transform existing tracks rather than generate songs from scratch, with artists and labels controlling whether their tracks can be remixed and modified tracks generating new royalty payments.
"The future of streaming is social and co-creative," said Andrei Avsievich, GRAI Co-founder and President. "It just needed two things: the demand and the technology. With today's AI, it now has both."
In August, GRAI and Udio became the first two companies to license a portfolio of more than 24 patents from Music IP Holdings, the entity formed by Universal Music Group and IP firm Liquidax. The patents cover moderation, watermarking, licensed distribution and monetization for AI music. GRAI has also said its service runs on its own music foundation model trained on licensed data.
GRAI says the new service will pay artists and songwriters for every play and every change to a song. It has not said when the service will launch, whether Hangout will keep operating as a standalone app, or how royalties on modified tracks will be calculated. A waitlist is open at grai.fm.