Stability AI Secures ‘Significant’ Investment, Names CEO, Executive Chairman
Stability AI said Tuesday (June 25) that it secured “significant” new funding from an investment group and appointed a new CEO and a new executive chairman.
The new capital and leadership will accelerate the company’s growth and ability to deliver generative artificial intelligence (AI) products, Stability AI said in a Tuesday press release.
The firm’s new CEO is Prem Akkaraju, the former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, according to the release.
Akkaraju will assume the role immediately and will “focus on driving Stability AI’s go-forward strategy,” the release said.
“Stability AI is the backbone of the visual AI ecosystem,” Akkaraju said in the release. “The company’s world-class team, breakthrough models and unique developer network attracted me to take on the CEO role.”
The company will continue to release open models for the community, will meet the demand for AI solutions from large-scale corporations, and will “spearhead the real convergence of generative AI and studio content,” Akkaraju added.
Interim co-CEOs Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, who held those positions since March, will remain with the company as chief operating officer and chief technology officer, respectively, per the release.
Stability AI also announced Tuesday that former Facebook president and current entrepreneur Sean Parker has joined the Stability AI board as executive chairman.
“I’m committed to the open-source principles that Stability AI was built upon,” Parker said in the release. “These principles have made Stability AI’s open models the most widely used foundational AI image models globally. Our investment in Stability AI enables the continued development of open-source, open access and open-weight models for the benefit of the entire community.”
Parker added that the market opportunity in generative media, including images, video, 3D, voice and music, “is just getting started.”
It was reported in April that Stability AI was laying off an unspecified number of employees and restructuring weeks after the company’s founder, Emad Mostaque, resigned as CEO and a member of the board.
Mostaque stepped down from those positions in March, saying that he aimed to pursue decentralized AI.
When Stability AI announced his resignation, it said in a blog post that it was searching for a permanent CEO and preparing for its next phase of growth.
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