- Stability AI has raised $76 million in a Series B round backed by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group and Electronic Arts.
- The round brings the company’s total funding to $232 million under chief executive Prem Akkaraju, who took over in June 2024.
- Two of the three labels backing the round — Universal and Warner — had strategic partnerships with Stability AI before this investment; Sony did not.
Stability AI, the London-founded, San Francisco-based maker of Stable Diffusion, has closed a $76 million Series B round with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group and Electronic Arts all writing checks alongside AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures.
It is the first time that all three major labels have taken an equity stake in the same AI company.
Coatue, Greycroft, Kadmos Capital, Sean Parker and Eric Schmidt all returned for a second consecutive round, joining existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis Capital, Sound Ventures and WPP.
“This unmatched group of investors is an affirmation of our vision where generative AI empowers every producer, musician, and storyteller. Stability is unique in the AI field because we are creative people making tools for creatives. Developing industry-defining technology means assembling a team of industry-defining titans, and that’s what we have done here,” said Prem Akkaraju, chief executive of Stability AI.
The round is a sharp turn from where the music industry stood two years ago, when Universal, Sony and Warner were suing AI song generators Suno and Udio over unlicensed training data.
Since late 2025, the same labels have settled those disputes and signed licensing deals with Udio, Suno and a startup called Klay Vision rather than continuing to litigate. Stability’s raise extends that shift from courtroom to cap table.
The generative AI market in media and entertainment was worth an estimated $2.5 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $8.06 billion by 2030, according to a July 2026 report from The Business Research Company.
From Stable Diffusion to professional creative tools
Stability AI was founded by Emad Mostaque in 2019 and built its name on Stable Diffusion, the open-source image generator that helped kick off the current wave of consumer generative AI.
Mostaque stepped down as chief executive in March 2024, and Stability AI hired Akkaraju, the former chief executive of Weta Digital, three months later. The pivot since then has been consistent: fewer research headlines, more work licensing music, image and video models directly to the studios and labels that used to view the company as a legal threat.
Universal signed its partnership with Stability in October 2025, and Warner followed in November 2025; Sony has no equivalent announced partnership, making its appearance among the new investors the more surprising line in the announcement.
Stability’s most recent product, Stable Audio 3.0, is built entirely on licensed training data and is available through a digital audio workstation plugin or directly on StableAudio.com. The company’s answer to the argument that licensed platforms need to outperform the unlicensed ones, not just out-argue them in court.
A crowded creative AI market
The company is competing in a market where nobody agrees on how big the prize is, only that it’s large.
In image generation, Black Forest Labs — founded by three former Stability AI researchers — raised $300 million at a $3.25 billion valuation in December 2025, while Midjourney, Adobe and Recraft compete for the same professional creative users.
In video, Runway raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation in February 2026 and has since shifted its ambitions from video generation toward broader AI world models.
Both rivals are now worth several times what Stability disclosed for this round — Stability did not reveal a valuation, which is itself worth noting given how loudly its rivals have.
Thomas Laffont, co-founder of Coatue, is joining Stability’s board with this round. “While others are building generalized AI, Stability AI is building creative tools and doing it alongside the artists, studios, and rights holders whose work defines the field,” he said.
What’s next
Stability said the new capital will go toward its creative production product suite, its applied research work, and the expansion of a professional services arm that works directly with studios and labels.
The bigger question the round doesn’t answer is what happens to the AI companies that never got a seat at this table. Suno and Udio have settled with the labels and are building their own licensed products; smaller, unlicensed generators have no such deal and no obvious way to get one.
If licensing is becoming the price of admission to work with the majors, the gap between the AI companies that can afford it and those that can’t will only widen.
