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.
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SOURCE Stability AI