London鈥檚 Stability AI has raised fresh funding and appointed a new-look executive team of industry heavyweights in what could be a lifeline for the business.
The generative AI company revealed the news of the investment from Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and O鈥橲haughnessy Ventures, alongside tech executives including Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Robert Nelsen and Prem Akkaraju.
Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, has been appointed CEO, while billionaire Parker is now executive chairman.
It comes months after the exit of founder and CEO Emad Mostaque as Stability AI struggled to generate anywhere near enough revenues to cover its cloud computing and other costs.
Reports suggest the investor group has reached a deal with cloud providers and other suppliers to drop $100m it owes and a potential $300m in future obligations.
Stability AI raised $101m in a seed round led by Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners at a $1 billion dollar valuation in 2022, but has struggled to raise further funds and it generated just $11m in sales in 2023.聽
Stable Diffusion, Stability AI鈥檚 flagship model, has had over 150m total downloads and has played a foundational role in generating most online AI-generated images.
鈥淪tability AI is the backbone of the visual AI ecosystem. The company鈥檚 world-class team, breakthrough models and unique developer network attracted me to take on the CEO role,鈥� said Akkaraju.聽
鈥淲e 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.聽
鈥淎dditionally, Stability AI is now in an ideal position to spearhead the real convergence of generative AI and studio content.鈥�
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Joining Akkaraju and Parker on the new-look board are Dana Settle, co-founder and managing partner of Greycroft; and Colin Bryant, COO and general partner of Coatue Management.
鈥淪tability 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,鈥� said Parker.聽
鈥淚鈥檓 committed to the open-source principles that Stability AI was built upon. These principles have made Stability AI鈥檚 open models the most widely used foundational AI image models globally.聽
鈥淥ur investment in Stability AI enables the continued development of open-source, open access, and open-weight models for the benefit of the entire community.鈥�
Jim O鈥橲haughnessy, retiring chairman of Stability AI, said: 鈥淚鈥檓 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鈥檓 delighted to continue to work alongside the Stability AI team as an investor.鈥�
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.
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