AI Music Generation Platform Suno Raises $250 Million in Funding, Valued at $2.45 Billion Leads to New Industry Thoughts

Last night, the U.S.AI music compositionflat-roofed buildingSunoannounced the completion of a $250 million (roughly Rs. 1.777 billion) Series Cfinancing, the company is valued at $2.45 billion (roughly Rs. 17.415 billion), nearly five times the $500 million (roughly Rs. 3.554 billion) valuation it had in May last year. According to the Wall Street Journal, Suno's annual revenue has reached $200 million (roughly Rs. 1.422 billion).

Led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA's venture capital arm NVentures, Hallwood Media, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Matrix, the new funding will help Suno accelerate its product development and build an ecosystem where creators, listeners, and the music industry can all participate.

▲Suno official blog (Source: Suno)

Previously, Suno had announced on May 22, 2024 that it had secured $125 million (roughly Rs. 888 million) in financing, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and others, valuing Suno at $500 million (roughly Rs. 3.554 billion) at that time.

Founded in 2022, Suno specializes in the field of AI music generation, and has developed the Suno model that can directly generate a complete song with vocals, lyrics, arrangement, and mixing with just a text description. At present, Suno has launched the latest v5 version, the official claim that v5 is the world's best music model, completely solved the mechanical sense of AI vocals, improve the dynamic loudness of the audio and the sense of spatiality of the sound field, the success rate of executing complex commands such as specified rhythms can be up to 90%. In addition, Suno has also opened up its v4.5-all model for all users for free, the model The v4.5-all model is faster than the previous v3.5-all model and can better handle vocal pitch changes.

In September, Suno also launched Suno Studio, the first generative audio workstation, which combines professional multi-track editing and generative AI to generate diverse sub-tracks, support multiple creation portals such as uploading samples and calling up libraries, and is compatible with any DAW (professional music production software).

Suno's co-founding team worked together at Kensho, a Cambridge-based AI finance company. co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman, PhD, graduated from Harvard University with a specialization in Physics and served as Head of Machine Learning at Kensho; Suno's current CTO Georg Kucsko graduated from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, with a Masters degree in Physics and a PhD in Physics from Harvard University; Martin Camacho studied Computer Science and Mathematics at Harvard University and received his Harvard degree at the age of 18. D. in Physics from Harvard University; Martin Camacho studied Computer Science and Mathematics at Harvard University and received his Harvard Diploma at the age of 18; Keenan Freyberg graduated from George Washington University and is currently Suno's Chief Operating Officer. Operations Officer at Suno.

▲Suno Co-Founder Team

According to the Wall Street Journal, AI music platforms have sparked a lot of controversy and legal battles in the music industry. Three major record labels, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group, have filed a lawsuit against Suno and another AI music platform, Udio, and have accused the AI companies of ripping off copyrighted music from the Internet on their training models.

However, Universal Music has officially announced on October 30 that it has reached a settlement with Udio and will partner with Udio to launch a new platform for AI music trained with licensed songs, with a new subscription service set to launch next year and allowing fans to create and share music on the Udio platform.

In response to the lawsuit, Suno responded that its technology is designed to create new content, not copy existing content.

Conclusion: AI Music Generation Threshold Lowered Again, Copyright Litigation Problems Already Solved

According to Suno co-founder and CEO, Madge Schulman, the company's goal is to provide interactive music tools for the average person. He talks about, “The future of music is going to be much broader, with more people actively involved in music, and a more important place for music in society.”

AI music generation has lowered the bar for creators and is becoming more accessible to the public, with more and more AI-generated music hitting the Billboard radio charts, and Xania Monet, an AI singer created by U.S. poetess Telisha “Nikki” Jones, recently hitting the R&B singles sales AI singer Xania Monet, created by American poetess Telisha "Nikki" Jones, recently reached number one on the R&B singles sales chart.

AI music generation platforms such as Suno are responding aggressively to the issue of copyright litigation, as exemplified by Universal Music and Udio's change from a lawsuit to a partnership.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Suno