Stability AI raises $101 million

Background

Stability AI is a company that develops generative AI models. Its announcement of 17 October 2022 set out its funding and the figures it had reached by that date, including the adoption of Stable Diffusion ^[1]. A funding round is the stage at which a company raises money from investors, usually in exchange for shares in the company. Announcements of this kind record how much capital a company had at a given date, which makes later rounds easier to compare.

What happened

On 17 October 2022 Stability AI announced $101 million in funding ^[1]. The round was led by Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners and O'Shaughnessy Ventures ^[1]. The company said the money would accelerate open AI models for image, language, audio, video and 3D ^[1].

Key details

The announcement gave figures on adoption. Stability said Stable Diffusion had been downloaded and licensed by more than 200,000 developers ^[1]. Its DreamStudio app had more than 1 million registered users in more than 50 countries, who had created over 170 million images ^[1].

Chief executive Emad Mostaque tied the value of the technology to openness. He said its potential would be realised only "if the technology is open and accessible to all" ^[1].

An open model is one whose code or trained weights are shared publicly, so that others can run and adapt it. This is the sense of "open" used in the announcement ^[1].

Impact

The announcement records Stability AI's position in October 2022: new funding, a stated commitment to open models across image, language, audio, video and 3D, and reported figures for developers and users ^[1]. The adoption numbers measure downloads, licences and registered users at the date of the announcement. They do not measure revenue or the use of any particular product, so they should be read as the company's own figures for that moment.