GRAI secures $9M to prioritize music remixing over generation

GRAI, a music lab startup built by Belarusian founders, has raised $9 million in seed funding to develop social music apps. The company was co-founded by CEO Ilya Liasun, CTO Dima Kamarouski, and president Andrei Avsievich. The team is largely based in Poland, where they are focusing on user interaction and remixing rather than generative AI music creation.

The seed funding round was co-led by:

• Khosla Ventures
• Inovo VC

Other participants in the round included:

• Tensor Ventures
• Tiny.VC
• Flyer One Ventures
• a16z Scout Fund
• Angel investors Andrew Zhai, Greg Tkachenko, Rob Reid, and Dima Shvets.

The startup intends to aim its products at Gen Z and Gen Alpha users. GRAI believes that most people do not want to use AI to generate music from scratch, but rather prefer participating in music culture through remixing. Users could play with tracks inside GRAI’s apps, perhaps remixing a favorite tune, which the company hopes will help them discover new artists and songs outside of larger platforms like TikTok, Reels, or YouTube.

According to Liasun, the startup wants to address a lack of social context in current music consumption. He explains that the idea the company is built around is what the next step can be in music AI interaction and consumption.

To power these social apps, GRAI is building a “derivatives pipeline”—which the company defines as infrastructure for transforming audio while preserving the original track’s identity. This technology allows users to modify tracks while maintaining artist control. Liasun emphasizes that the platform focuses on interaction rather than flooding streaming services with low-quality generative AI content, which he refers to as “GenAI slop.”

“We don’t want to share new GenAI slop with the streaming services. We actually focus on the interaction part,” says Liasun, GRAI co-founder and CEO.

The company is talking to music labels up front to build a future system where artists will have the ability to opt in and opt out of having their tracks remixed. GRAI believes that AI could lead to new ways to engage with music beyond just creating a tune, potentially creating a new source of royalty payments to artists and labels.

Why it matters

GRAI represents a shift in the AI music sector from pure generative models toward social, interactive platforms that aim to integrate artist consent and royalty structures from the start.