Suno, the AI-driven music creation app that has been getting attention for its ability to create unnervingly good music, has raised USD $125 million in a Series B funding round.<\/p>\n
Among the investors in Suno are VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners<\/strong>, which has also invested in Stability AI<\/strong><\/a> and Everyrealm<\/strong><\/a>, the metaverse firm backed by music stars like Nas<\/strong> and Lil Baby<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Other investors include VC fund Founder Collective<\/strong>, and Nat Friedman<\/strong>, a tech executive and investor known for his stint as CEO of GitHub<\/strong>. He is an advisor at Midjourney<\/strong>, an AI techn platform that generates images.<\/p>\n Joining them is Daniel Gross<\/strong>, a colleague of Friedman\u2019s who led AI development efforts at Apple<\/strong> and served as a partner at Y-Combinator<\/strong>.<\/p>\n “We released our first product eight months ago, enabling anyone to make a song with just a simple idea. It\u2019s very early days, but 10 million<\/strong> people have already made music using Suno,” Co-Founder and CEO Mikey Shulman<\/strong> said in a blog post<\/a> announcing the funding round.<\/p>\n “While Grammy-winning artists use Suno, our core user base consists of everyday people making music \u2014 often for the first time.”<\/p>\n According to sources cited by The Information,<\/em> <\/a>the funding round gives the two-year-old, Massachusetts-headquartered company an implied value of $500 million<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The newly-raised funds will be used to expand the company’s staff, which as of earlier this year, amounted to just 12 employees.<\/p>\n Suno has been soaring in popularity ever since a Rolling Stone<\/em> article<\/a> earlier this year described how the AI tech\u2019s ability to create authentic-sounding music unnerved even some of its creators. The algorithm uses OpenAI<\/strong>\u2019s ChatGPT to generate lyrics, and its own proprietary algorithms to generate music and vocals.<\/p>\n However, speculation has grown that Suno\u2019s model was trained on copyrighted music without license from the rights holders.<\/p>\n In a guest column for MBW<\/a>, Ed Newton-Rex<\/strong>, founder of Fairly Trained<\/strong>, a non-profit that certifies ethically trained AI, listed off uncanny similarities between music generated by Suno and copyrighted songs such as Queen<\/strong>\u2019s Bohemian Rhapsody<\/em>, Abba<\/strong>\u2019s Dancing Queen<\/em> and Oasis<\/strong>\u2019 Don\u2019t Look Back In Anger<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n Suno\u2019s founders \u2013 Shulman<\/strong>, Georg Kucsko<\/strong>, Martin Camacho<\/strong>, and Keenan Freyberg<\/strong>, all formerly of AI startup Kensho<\/strong> \u2013 stress that, unlike some other generative AI models, Suno doesn\u2019t allow users to ask for music created in the style of any specific artist.<\/p>\n However, an early investor in the firm, Antonio Rodriguez<\/strong>, a partner at VC firm Matrix<\/strong>, told Rolling Stone<\/em> he is prepared for the possibility that Suno may face lawsuits from music labels and publishers.<\/p>\n He described this as \u201cthe risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we\u2019re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n He added that \u201cif we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn\u2019t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.\u201d<\/p>\n As AI has exploded in popularity over the past few years, so have lawsuits by rightsholders alleging copyright infringement by AI developers. In one closely-watched case, Universal Music Group<\/strong> joined several other music companies in suing Anthropic AI<\/strong><\/a>, claiming that its Claude chatbot rips off copyrighted song lyrics.<\/p>\n Other such lawsuits have involved allegations that AI copied books<\/a> and newspaper articles<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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