Music startup Grai, with Belarusian roots, acquired the social music listening platform Hangout. It was created by the authors of the Turntable.fm service. The sum and other terms of the deal are not disclosed, writes Office Life.
The company Grai was founded by Belarusians Ilya Lesun, Dmitry Komarovsky, and Andrey Avseevich. Previously, since 2019, they worked on the video editing app Vochi, which was later acquired by Pinterest. Now Grai, with the help of artificial intelligence, develops and experiments with new music products. In April, the startup attracted $9 million in investments.
After acquiring Hangout, Grai plans to maintain and develop the partnerships that the platform has already established with music labels, publishers, and collective rights management organizations. The companies want to create a new generation platform for social music streaming.
Hangout founder Joseph Pearl said that the project was created as an attempt to bring the atmosphere of shared music listening online. The idea was to recreate a situation where friends sit together in a room, pass records to each other, and listen to music as a shared experience, rather than just individually playing tracks.
Grai co-founder Andrey Avseevich noted that music for him has always been connected with people, as his grandfather sang in an opera house. According to him, the Hangout team showed how strongly people want to unite around music and not just press the 'play' button, but also interact with it more actively. Grai believes that the future of streaming is linked to social interaction and collaborative creativity, and modern artificial intelligence technologies allow for the development of this direction.
In August, Grai became one of the first two companies to receive a license for Music IP Holdings patents. They regulate the use of recorded music in conjunction with artificial intelligence technologies — from authorization to payment processing.
Grai's public launch is expected in the near future. The company has already opened a waiting list registration.
Half were denied, a third were granted refugee status. August results of reviews of Belarusians' applications for international protection in Poland have become known 2626
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