Sean Parker Joins as Executive Chairman
Alongside Several Other New Board Members
Investors to include Greycroft, Coatue
Management, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners,
Sean Parker, Eric Schmidt and Prem
Akkaraju
LOS
ANGELES, June 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Stability
AI, a leading imaging, language, code and audio generative AI
company, today announced it has closed an initial round of
investment from a world-class investor group. Additionally,
Prem Akkaraju, an investor and
highly experienced media, entertainment and technology executive,
has been appointed CEO.
This infusion of capital and leadership will be instrumental in
accelerating Stability AI's growth and ability to deliver
best-in-class generative AI products into the market for consumer
and enterprise use. The investor group includes top-tier
institutions, namely: Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures,
Lightspeed Venture Partners, O'Shaughnessy Ventures, and renowned
operators and tech executives, including Sean Parker, Prem
Akkaraju, Eric Schmidt and
Robert Nelsen.
Prem Akkaraju, former CEO of
visual effects company Weta Digital, an Academy Award-winning film
production and visual effects powerhouse, will assume the role of
CEO effective immediately and will focus on driving Stability AI's
go-forward strategy. He will do this alongside the talented
technical team that has built Stability AI into one of the driving
forces of generative AI.
Prem Akkaraju, CEO of
Stability AI, said: "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."
Sean Parker, entrepreneur,
philanthropist and former President of Facebook, joins the
Stability AI Board as Executive Chairman. Other board members
include Dana Settle, Co-Founder and
Managing Partner of Greycroft, Colin
Bryant, COO, General Partner of Coatue Management and CEO
Prem Akkaraju.
Sean Parker, Executive
Chairman of Stability AI, said: "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."
Stability AI's models are the #1 most-liked text-to-image models
on open-source database Hugging Face. Stable Diffusion, Stability
AI's flagship model, has had over 150M total downloads and has played a
foundational role in generating most online AI-generated images.
The company's most recent release, Stable Diffusion 3, is currently
at the top of the download charts with over 2M downloads since it launched earlier this
month. Significant enterprise interest in Stability AI's technology
exists, with thousands of business user downloads, including those
from hundreds of major enterprises. Additionally, Stability AI is
surrounded by one of the largest and most active AI open-source
communities, to which the company continues to be committed to
fostering and enabling free access to models.
Sean Parker continued to say:
"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."
"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, 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."
Jim O'Shaughnessy, Retiring
Chairman of Stability AI said: "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."
Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, who served as interim
co-CEO's since March 2024, will
remain with the company as COO and CTO respectively.
UBS acted as lead financial advisor to Stability AI.
Notes to Editors:
About Stability AI
Stability AI is a global company
working to enhance humanity's creativity through artificial
intelligence (AI). Stability AI develops a range of generative AI
models for image, language, audio, and video. Stability AI's
flagship model, Stable Diffusion, is a family of open-source image
models that powers up to ~80% of AI-generated imagery; their
open-source language models have been downloaded over six million
times; and their audio model, Stable Audio, was recently listed on
the TIME Best Inventions of 2023.
About Prem
Akkaraju
Prem Akkaraju
was the former CEO of Weta Digital, an Academy Award winning film
production and visual effects powerhouse. Weta Digital worked on
80+ major studio films, including Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water,
Lord of the Rings and Avengers Endgame. At Weta, Prem led the
development of a robust cloud-based film production pipeline, which
was sold to Unity Software in November
2021 for $1.625 billion.
Prem has an MBA from Columbia Business
School and double BA in Applied Mathematics and Economics
from the University of New Mexico. He
currently resides in Los Angeles
with his wife Mary Ann, and two
children.
For media inquiries, please contact:
E: press@stability.ai, stability@hstrategies.com
T: +44 208 194 3184
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SOURCE Stability AI