Stability AI, a leading generative AI business focused on image, language, code, and audio, has announced the successful completion of a first round of funding from a select group of world-class investors. This strategic investment is expected to accelerate the company’s growth and improve its capacity to provide cutting-edge generative AI solutions to both the consumer and business sectors.
Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and famous tech leaders such as Sean Parker, Prem Akkaraju, Eric Schmidt, and Robert Nelsen are among the major institutions that make up the investing consortium.
Prem Akkaraju, an investor and experienced leader in media, entertainment, and technology, has been named the new CEO of Stability AI. Akkaraju, who formerly served as CEO of visual effects giant Weta Digital, will be responsible for leading the company’s strategic objectives and using its brilliant technical staff to preserve Stability AI’s leadership position in the generative AI market.
Stability AI has some big news….
— Stability AI (@StabilityAI) June 25, 2024
We’re delighted to have secured significant investment from a world-class investor group including top-tier institutions such as @greycroftvc, @coatuemgmt, @sound_ventures_, @lightspeedvp, @osventuresllc, and renowned operators and tech… pic.twitter.com/CN9PMfGxTp
“Stability AI is the backbone of the visual AI ecosystem. The Company’s world-class team, breakthrough models, and unique developer network attracted me to take on the CEO role. We will continue to release the most cutting-edge open models for the community while meeting the overwhelming demand for AI solutions from large-scale corporations. Additionally, Stability AI is now in an ideal position to spearhead the real convergence of generative AI and studio content,” said Akkaraju.
Sean Parker, an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and former Facebook President, has joined Stability AI’s board as Executive Chairman. He will join other board members such as Dana Settle, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Greycroft, Colin Bryant, COO and General Partner of Coatue Management, and CEO Prem Akkaraju. Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, who served as interim co-CEOs since March 2024, will remain with the company as COO and CTO, respectively. UBS acted as the lead financial advisor to Stability AI in this transaction.
“Stability AI has made a global impact by creating the leading generative image foundation models and fostering the largest ecosystem of generative AI media creators and developers. Innovation happens at the intersection of art and technology: the company’s world-class research and applied AI teams collaborate with a vibrant community of AI artists, model builders, and developers who have ingeniously extended the capabilities of the company’s core models. This investment will enable the creation of even more powerful models and allow the community to continue pushing the boundaries of human creativity,” said Parker.
“I’m committed to the open-source principles that Stability AI was built upon. These principles have made Stability AI’s open models the most widely used foundational AI image models globally. Our investment in Stability AI enables the continued development of open-source, open access, and open-weight models for the benefit of the entire community,” Parker added.
“The market opportunity in generative media—spanning images, video, 3D, voice, and music—is just getting started. We’re focused on growth in four key areas: 1) managed image, video, and audio pipelines and workflows for developers, 2) custom enterprise models, 3) content creation and production tools serving everyone from independent content creators to major studios, and 4) powering B2C applications for generative art, creativity, graphic design, social software, and gaming,” Parker continued.
Stability AI’s models are the top-rated text-to-image models in the open-source database Hugging Face. The company’s main model, Stable Diffusion, has been downloaded over 150 million times and is responsible for the majority of online AI-generated photos. The most recent version, Stable Diffusion 3, has led the download rankings with almost 2 million downloads since its release earlier this month. Stability AI’s technology has generated substantial industry interest, with thousands of business user downloads, including those from hundreds of big organisations. Stability AI continues to cultivate one of the largest and most active AI open-source communities while being dedicated to offering free access to its models.
Jim O’Shaughnessy, the retiring Chairman of Stability AI, expressed his confidence in the new leadership team, saying, “I’m very impressed by the new leadership team of Sean and Prem and the investor group supporting them. I fully believe in their vision and long history of repeated and extraordinary success. I’m delighted to continue to work alongside the Stability AI team as an investor.”
Stability AI has a community of 300,000 creators, developers, and researchers around the world. With the new leadership move and investments coming in, there is so much to look forward to.