Stability AI raises $76mn from Universal, Warner, Sony Music and EA

The world’s three largest record companies have bought equity in a generative AI company.

Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group are all new investors in Stability AI’s $76mn Series B. The company announced the round on Tuesday. The games publisher Electronic Arts joined it, alongside AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures.

Coatue, Greycroft, Kadmos Capital, Sean Parker and Eric Schmidt also took part, backing the company for a second consecutive round.

They sit on a register that already held Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis Capital, Sound Ventures and the marketing group WPP. The individual holders include James Cameron, Kevin Mayer, Mark Burnett, Patrick Whitesell and Robert Nelsen.

Stability did not disclose a valuation. The round brings its total funding to $232mn under chief executive Prem Akkaraju. That figure covers two equity rounds and convertible notes since he took the job in June 2024.

What the money is for

The capital will fund the product suite for creative production, according to the announcement. It will also deepen the applied research discipline and expand the professional services arm.

That is a narrower brief than the one Stability once had. It now calls itself a maker of purpose-built AI products for professional creatives in music, gaming and entertainment.

Two of the three labels were already partners

Universal entered a strategic alliance with Stability in October 2025, to co-develop AI music tools. Tim Ingham reported the dates for Music Business Worldwide. Warner announced its own partnership the following month.

Sony Music has no comparable announced partnership. Its name appears among the new investors in the funding release, but not among the strategic partners the company lists.

Electronic Arts is also an existing partner. It signed a deal with Stability to build models on its catalogue and intellectual property before writing this cheque.

The licensing pitch

The round follows Stable Audio 3.0, which the company launched in May. Stability says it trained that family of open-weight music models on fully licensed data, and that they can produce professional-grade tracks running past six minutes.

Musicians can reach the models through a digital audio workstation plugin or on the web. The plugin matters more than it sounds, because it puts the tool inside the software producers already work in.

Stability set out the commercial logic in its release. Responsibly trained models are critical but not enough on their own, it wrote. Artist-centric AI will only win if the experience on a licensed platform beats the experience on an unlicensed one.

That is a claim about product quality rather than ethics, and it is the one this round is funding. It also concedes the obvious point that unlicensed tools currently work well enough for people to use them.

The litigation has not gone away

Stability continues to face copyright claims in other parts of its business, Ingham noted. The emphasis on licensed training data sits alongside those cases rather than resolving them.

The labels have their own history on the other side of this argument. A German court ruled against Suno in July over music copyright, the first such decision in Europe. Universal settled its own lawsuit against Udio before partnering with Stability.

The wider industry has been moving towards disclosure rather than prohibition. Apple Music now labels AI songs using tags that became mandatory this month.

The artists are already there

AI-assisted tracks reached the charts earlier this year, and the artists using the tools stopped concealing it.

Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine made the producers’ case last week. Only people who struggle to create are frightened of AI, Dre said, comparing the technology to the drum machine.

Australia’s main charts took the opposite view this week, excluding songs made mostly or entirely by AI.

An investor that was itself just bought

Electronic Arts is an unusual name on a cap table right now. A Saudi-led consortium took EA private three weeks ago in the largest leveraged buyout ever completed.

The publisher carries substantial debt from that deal. It is still writing cheques for the AI tooling it plans to build games with.

What London lost

Stability began in London in 2019 and released Stable Diffusion from there in August 2022. Users have downloaded that model more than 350mn times, and an entire ecosystem of tools grew on top of it.

The company has since closed its London office and moved its focus to the United States, with an office in Los Angeles. John Reynolds reported the move for tech.eu. Tuesday’s release carries a Los Angeles dateline.

The board pushed out founder Emad Mostaque in 2024, amid employee departures, internal strife and lawsuits, Reynolds wrote. Akkaraju, previously chief executive of Weta Digital, replaced him that June.

Britain has produced few AI companies of this profile, and this one now raises, builds and announces from California. WPP, the London-listed marketing group, remains one of the few British names attached to it.

Who is on the board

Thomas Laffont, co-founder of Coatue, joins the board as part of the round. Others build generalised AI while Stability builds creative tools alongside the artists, studios and rights holders whose work defines the field, he said in a statement.

He joins the film director James Cameron, Sean Parker, Greycroft’s Dana Settle and Akkaraju. Parker serves as executive chairman.

Corbin Bolies first reported the round for Variety, which had it as an exclusive.

Stability has now set itself a test anyone can apply. Its own release says a licensed platform has to be better, not merely cleaner. The $76mn is what it has to prove that with, and the labels holding the shares are the ones who will judge it.