Generative AI music platform Suno is shopping for more than $100 million in new funding at a valuation exceeding $2 billion, Bloomberg reports.
The figure represents nearly a 4x jump from its previous valuation and comes as the company reportedly generates over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Suno previously raised $125 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Matrix and Founder Collective.
The fresh funding discussions arrive in the wake of reports that Suno is engaging in settlement talks with three major labels, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, to license their catalogs and resolve ongoing legal battles. The consortium sued both Suno and competitor Udio for copyright infringement in June 2024, alleging the companies trained their AI models on copyrighted music without permission. The labels are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work, which could translate to billions in damages.
The platform allows users to generate songs simply by entering text prompts, stoking tension in the music industry as artists bemoan the AI-powered platform for bastardizing the art of music production. Suno and their ilk learn by ingesting vast libraries of songs, essentially copying the creative output of human musicians without consent or compensation.
The platform has become a lightning rod in the artist community because many musicians view its technology as existential theft. Artists worry it will devalue their work and flood the market with cheap alternatives, while many also take issue with how easily anyone can generate tracks that mimic specific styles or genres that took years to develop. The lawsuit from major labels crystallizes these concerns, framing AI music generation as large-scale copyright violation rather than innovation.
Mikey Shulman, Suno’s co-founder and CEO, faced pervasive backlash in January after claiming in an interview that most people find the music creation process “not really enjoyable.”
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said on the venture capital industry podcast The Twenty Minute VC (20VC). “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software… I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
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