Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, raises $101M • ZebethMedia

Stability AI, the company funding the development of open source music- and image-generating systems like Dance Diffusion and Stable Diffusion, today announced that it raised $101 million in a funding round led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. The tranche values the company at $1 billion post-money, according to a Bloomberg source, and comes as the demand for AI-powered content generation accelerates.
Stability AI is the brainchild of Emad Mostaque. Having graduated from Oxford with a Masters in mathematics and computer science, he served as an analyst at various hedge funds before shifting gears to more public-facing works. Mostque co-founded and bootstrapped Stability AI in 2020, motivated both by a personal fascination with AI and what he characterized as a lack of “organization” within the open source AI community.
“Nobody has any voting rights except our … employees — no billionaires, big funds, governments or anyone else with control of the company or the communities we support. We’re completely independent,” Mostaque, who serves as Stability AI’s CEO, told ZebethMedia in a previous interview. “We plan to use our compute to accelerate open source, foundational AI.”
Stability AI has a cluster of more than 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running in AWS, which it uses to train models including Stable Diffusion.
Stability AI plans to make money by training “private” models for customers and acting as a general infrastructure layer. It also offers a platform, DreamStudio, through which its models can be accessed by individual users — Mostaque told Bloomberg that DreamStudio has more than 1.5 million users and Stable Diffusion has more than 10 million daily users “across all channels.” Meanwhile, the open source version of Stable Diffusion has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, according to a press release published by Stability AI this morning.
Stability AI claims to have other commercializable projects in the works, including AI models for generating audio and even video.
According to Mostaque, the capital from the funding round will support deploying custom versions of Stable Diffusion for users at a larger scale and investing in more supercomputing power. It’ll also be put toward hiring more people, with Mostaque saying he expects to grow to about 300 employees from 100 over the next year.
Stability AI has made several high-profile hires recently, bringing on research scientists from Google Brain and futurist and public speaker Daniel Jeffries.
Sri Viswanath, a general partner at Coatue, said in a statement: “At Coatue, we believe that open source AI technologies have the power to unlock human creativity and achieve a broader good. Stability AI is a big idea that dreams beyond the immediate applications of AI. We are excited to be part of Stability AI’s journey, and we look forward to seeing what the world creates with Stability AI’s technology.”