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GRAI

Music AI infrastructure enabling collaborative remixes

Overview

GRAI builds infrastructure for participatory music experiences, allowing people to remix and interact with existing songs instead of only generating new tracks. Its products—Music with Friends for collaborative remixing on iOS and Remix Playground as an Android AI music sandbox—use a taste and participation graph, a real-time audio system, and a derivatives pipeline that links each remix back to the original track so rights holders can participate in royalties. Unlike generic AI music tools, GRAI focuses on licensed, collaborative remixing and provides the infrastructure to manage rights and royalties while tying every derivative to its source. The goal is to deepen rights-aligned music infrastructure and grow consumer products, creating a new royalty stream for artists, labels, and creators.

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About GRAI

Simplify's Rating
Why GRAI is rated
C+
Rated B on Competitive Edge
Rated C on Growth Potential
Rated C on Differentiation

Industries

Data & AnalyticsConsumer SoftwareAI & Machine LearningEntertainment

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$9M

Headquarters

Warsaw, Poland

Founded

2025

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • April 21, 2026 $9 million seed from Khosla and Inovo funds growth.
  • Two live apps, Music with Friends and Remix Playground, already validate demand.
  • August 2026 MIH licensing and September 2026 Hangout acquisition strengthen distribution and legitimacy.

What critics are saying

  • Udio and Suno own generation-first mindshare; GRAI risks becoming a niche remix toy.
  • Rights-holder dependence is existential; one label termination blocks core catalog access fast.
  • Hangout integration risks product distraction and churn before GRAI proves repeatable consumer retention.

What makes GRAI unique

  • GRAI turns songs into social remixes, not blank-prompt generation, by September 2026.
  • August 2026 Music IP Holdings licensing gives GRAI a rights-aligned commercialization path.
  • September 22, 2026 Hangout acquisition adds Turntable.fm-style social listening to GRAI's stack.

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Funding

Total Funding

$9M

Above

Industry Average

Funded Over

2 Rounds

Notable Investors:
Seed funding is usually the first official round after pre-seed, when a startup has a prototype or concept. It’s typically used to develop the product, test the market, and start building the team. Investors here are often angel investors or early-stage venture capitalists.
Seed Funding Comparison
Above Average

Industry standards

$3.3M
$2M
$2.3M
$3M
$9M

Benefits

  • Flexible Work Hours
  • Remote Work Options
  • Company Equity

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

17%

1 year growth

17%

2 year growth

17%
Digital Producer Magazine
Oct 15th, 2026
Rights before code: GRAI partners with MassiveMusic on catalog infrastructure and licensed AI training data.

Rights before code: GRAI partners with MassiveMusic on catalog infrastructure and licensed AI training data. The dual partnership equips GRAI's upcoming social streaming service with scalable catalogue delivery and enhanced metadata, alongside a separately licensed, opt-in dataset to train GRAI's own music model. WARSAW, Poland, Oct. 15, 2026/PRNewswire/ - GRAI, the AI music company, has partnered with MassiveMusic, part of Songtradr, which delivers music and data to digital platforms worldwide, on the music infrastructure behind its upcoming social streaming service and a dedicated dataset licensed for training its own music foundation model. Music has always been social: a Harvard-led study found song in every one of the 315 societies it examined, tied to the moments people share. Streaming solved access to music. Sharing it with the people around you is still catching up. GRAI is building a place for it, and sees the future of streaming as co-creative as well as social. Under the first agreement, MassiveMusic delivers commercial repertoire to GRAI through a single feed, providing a route to participating independent and distributor catalogs through MassiveMusic's established rightsholder agreements. Tracks arrive with permissions assigned as determined by the applicable rightsholder agreements, and approved titles are available on GRAI within minutes of MassiveMusic sending them. The feed is designed to scale to the catalog licensed for GRAI through MassiveMusic, and building on MassiveMusic's existing infrastructure supports a quicker path to launch. Rightsholders will be paid and receive usage reports for plays on GRAI under the applicable agreements. MassiveMusic also supplies enhanced metadata, describing tracks across more than 30 dimensions, from mood and energy to instrumentation, key, and era. GRAI uses this metadata for search and recommendations, so a new listener can find their next favorite song from the first session, before they have friends on GRAI to discover through. It is also designed to support discovery of both recent releases and familiar recordings. "In engineering, you don't want to build on shaky ground and hope to fix the architecture under pressure. For us, establishing 'rights before code' from day one was an operational necessity. When music moves between people, the rights have to move with it. Partnering with MassiveMusic gave us that foundation right out of the gate, letting us build with total clarity and focus on the product." - Dzmitry Kamarouski, CTO and co-founder of GRAI. A second agreement covers AI training: GRAI trains its model on a dedicated, opt-in dataset approved by rightsholders specifically for AI training through MassiveMusic's opt-in system. Built in-house, the model is designed to understand the building blocks of a song (melody, harmony, and rhythm) rather than just generate audio. The training license does not itself authorize downstream creative uses of recordings or compositions. "Innovation and compliance are key to GRAI. We supplied a music platform built to support their services as they scale, from a dataset licensed for ethical AI training to catalogue delivery enriched with our proprietary enhanced metadata," said James Priestley, SVP Global Sales, Licensing and Technology at MassiveMusic. "Our aim is to take care of the backend heavy lifting so the GRAI team can remain focused on what matters most: their audience's needs and the end experience." GRAI is also one of the first two companies to license the patents of Music IP Holdings, which cover technology for using recorded music with AI, from creation and authorization to distribution and payment. The company is building toward letting people put something of their own into the songs they love, with artists, songwriters, and other rightsholders asked and paid. In September, GRAI announced the acquisition of Hangout, the social music platform from the creators of Turntable.fm. Early builds of GRAI are now in testing on a test catalog from MassiveMusic ahead of its public launch, and the waitlist is open at grai.fm. About GRAI GRAI is building a social streaming service for music. It is a place for a younger generation, where music finally moves between people rather than plays for one. Behind it is GRAI's own music foundation model, trained on data licensed for that purpose and built to understand music, not just generate audio. GRAI was founded in 2025 by the team behind Vochi, the video-editing app acquired by Pinterest, and has raised seed funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC. About MassiveMusic MassiveMusic, part of the Songtradr brand portfolio, is the global music and sound partner for leading brands, agencies and platforms. By blending creativity, data-driven insights and market-leading technology, MassiveMusic delivers scalable music strategies, innovative technology services and award-winning creative solutions, driving measurable business value and shaping the future of sound. SOURCE GRAI Inc.

PR Newswire
Sep 22nd, 2026
GRAI acquires Hangout FM to build AI-powered social music streaming platform

GRAI, an AI music company, has acquired Hangout, a social music platform created by the makers of Turntable.fm. The deal aims to build a service combining social listening with AI technology. Hangout demonstrated that people prefer discovering music through friends rather than algorithms. GRAI plans to scale this social experience using advanced technology whilst maintaining partnerships with labels, publishers and collecting societies. "The future of streaming is social and co-creative," said Andrei Avsievich, GRAI co-founder and president. Joseph Perla, Hangout's founder, said the platform was designed to recreate the collective experience of sharing music. GRAI secured licensing from Music IP Holdings in August, covering AI use of recorded music. The company, founded in 2025, raised seed funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC.

PR Newswire
Aug 20th, 2026
Music IP Holdings unveils AI music patent portfolio with Udio and GRAI as first licensees

Music IP Holdings has unveiled a patent portfolio for AI music creation, with Udio and GRAI becoming its first licensees. The framework covers the entire process of creating and commercialising AI-generated content, from prompt entry through to distribution and payment. MIH holds over 24 issued and allowed patents, with more than 50 pending. The portfolio extends beyond music to audio, video, film, animation, images and text. Universal Music Group will utilise the portfolio to protect its artists and songwriters against unlicensed AI uses. The patents are available through an online licensing platform at musiciprights.com. MIH was formed through a partnership between Universal Music Group and Liquidax Capital. Barefoot Media is supporting the portfolio's market launch and licensing development across technology and creative industries.

Creative AI News
Apr 21st, 2026
GRAI raises $9M for AI music remix apps instead of generators.

GRAI raises $9M for AI music remix apps instead of generators. GRAI launched with $9M seed from Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC for AI music remix apps Music with Friends (iOS) and Remix Playground (Android). Team previously sold VOCHI to Pinterest. GRAI, an AI music startup building remix-first social apps instead of text-to-song generators, came out of stealth on April 21, 2026 with $9 million in seed funding and two live consumer apps. The round is co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC, with participation from Tensor Ventures, Tiny.VC, Flyer One Ventures, and a16z Scout Fund. What happened. GRAI publicly introduced itself on April 21 via a TechCrunch profile that details the funding round and the thesis behind the company. The core argument from CEO Ilya Liasun: most people do not want to prompt a model to generate a song from scratch, they want to remix, restyle, and share tracks they already love with their friends. GRAI is building around that behavior. Two products are already shipping. Music with Friends is live on iOS and lets users remix trending tracks with AI and send the results to friends as a social thread. A second app, Remix Playground, ships on Android and focuses on solo style experimentation, letting users change the genre, tempo, or mood of a song without writing prompts. The company was founded by Ilya Liasun (CEO), Andrei Avsievich (President), and Dima Kamarouski (CTO). The team previously built VOCHI, an AI video creation app acquired by Pinterest. Angel investors in the round include Andrew Zhai (ex-Pinterest, co-founder Genova Labs), Greg Tkachenko (ex-Snap, founder Unreal Labs), Rob Reid (founder of Rhapsody), and Dima Shvets (Reface, MirAI). Why it matters. GRAI is a bet on a different shape of AI music than the one Suno and Udio popularized. Generation from scratch optimizes for producing new audio. Remix optimizes for participation around audio that already has cultural traction. The second one maps more cleanly onto how Gen Z and Gen Alpha actually discover music, which is through short-form content, friends, and fandoms, not through listening-to-a-prompt. The positioning also sidesteps the thorniest part of AI music. Deezer recently disclosed that 44 percent of daily uploads are now fully AI-generated, triggering fraud detection and demonetization. A remix-first product that routes activity toward existing rights holders rather than flooding streaming catalogs with new AI tracks is a different pitch to artists, labels, and platforms, and GRAI is explicitly framing it as a way to create new royalty surfaces rather than compete with artists. Key details. * Funding: $9 million seed, co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC * Other investors: Tensor Ventures, Tiny.VC, Flyer One Ventures, a16z Scout Fund, plus angels from Pinterest, Snap, Rhapsody, and Reface * Live products: Music with Friends (iOS), Remix Playground (Android) * Core feature: AI remix of existing tracks, not generation from text prompts * Target audience: Gen Z and Gen Alpha social music users * Founders: Ilya Liasun (CEO), Andrei Avsievich (President), Dima Kamarouski (CTO), previously VOCHI (acquired by Pinterest) * HQ: Belarus-origin team, now international What to do next. Creators and indie artists curious about remix-as-distribution can install Music with Friends on iOS or Remix Playground on Android and test what the AI does to their own tracks before deciding whether to opt into future licensing layers. The product is consumer-first today, but the economics only work if labels and independent artists grant remix rights, so expect a developer or partnership pathway to follow. For anyone tracking the AI music landscape alongside tools like Google Flow Music and the broader generation-first stack, GRAI is the clearest early example of a remix-and-share consumer product built on top of AI. Watch how quickly labels move from tolerating it to licensing it, which will determine whether remix-first becomes a real category or stays a novelty.

AInvest Fintech Inc.
Apr 21st, 2026
GRAI raises $9M to make music more social with AI-powered remixing tools

GRAI, a music technology startup, has raised $9 million in seed funding to develop AI-driven tools that enhance social interaction with music. The company is creating products including Music with Friends, a remixing app, and an AI music playground. GRAI emphasises that its mission is to complement rather than replace human creativity, working with artists and labels to expand how music can be experienced and shared. The startup is developing low-latency, high-fidelity audio solutions to deliver technically advanced user experiences. The company's approach aligns with broader industry trends in AI-generated music, where tools are increasingly used to create, remix and personalise audio content. GRAI positions itself as a participant in a growing market focused on artist collaboration and social engagement.

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