Stable Diffusion’s parent company has reached unicorn status by raising funds from celebrities in venture capital.
The parent company of Stable Diffusion, an artificial intelligence tool that creates digital art, has reached unicorn status after raising funds from some celebrities in venture capital.
According to a statement reviewed by Bloomberg News, Stability AI Ltd. has raised $101 million in a seed round led by Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The value of this round is around $1 billion London-based Stability AI, according to someone familiar with the matter who requested that the identity be not disclosed as the details are confidential. A representative of Stability AI declined to comment on the assessment.
Stable Diffusion is one of the few emerging AI models that, along with DALL-E 2, has the potential to overturn the visual arts. The way it works is for people to enter an image description. The program spits out realistic or surreal pictures.
What sets Stable Diffusion apart from its competitors is that its open source software is open to the public. Users can create applications related to design, film, augmented reality, video games, advertising, and e-commerce based on the code. Works even on small devices.
According to Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, the web application DreamStudio has over 1.5 million users and Stable Diffusion has over 10 million daily users across all channels.
Practical uses range from designing applications in the metaverse to creating PowerPoint presentations, he said.
“All creative companies around the world are testing this feature right now, especially since it can instantly create images of any style, especially when fine-tuned,” Mostaque said in an interview. “For years, there has been a promise of interactive personalized content. It is the first technology that can deliver this.”
Stability AI plans to use the funds to deploy custom versions of its models for users on a larger scale and invest more in supercomputing power. It will also hire more employees, and Mostaque said it expects to grow from 100 to about 300 in the next year.
Coatue and Lightspeed have pre-invested in machine learning and artificial intelligence, Lightspeed backed video game maker Epic Games Inc., and Coatue invested in data platform Scale AI Inc.
According to Lightspeed’s partner Gaurav Gupta, Stability AI has the potential to eliminate many “inefficiencies” in content creation.
“It basically empowers people to do more,” Gupta said in an interview. “Stability has done what a lot of people thought was impossible.”
