Still facing copyright lawsuits, AI music generator Suno raises another $400M
Quick Answer
AI music generator Suno has raised an additional $400 million, bringing its valuation to over $5.4 billion, up from $2.45 billion just seven months ago.
Quick Take
AI music generator Suno has raised an additional $400 million, bringing its valuation to over $5.4 billion, up from $2.45 billion just seven months ago. Despite facing ongoing copyright lawsuits, the startup continues to attract significant investment, highlighting its potential in the AI music space.
Key Points
- Suno's valuation increased from $2.45 billion to over $5.4 billion in seven months.
- The startup has raised a total of $400 million in its latest funding round.
- Ongoing copyright lawsuits are a significant challenge for the company.
- Suno's growth reflects strong investor confidence in AI music generation.
- The funding will likely support further development and expansion efforts.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readSuno, the AI music-generation company, announced on Wednesday that it has raised a $400 million Series D round, valuing the company at $5.4 billion. It was only about seven months ago that Suno raised at a $2.45 billion valuation, underscoring that investors are confident in the company’s future despite the litigation it faces.
That legal trouble isn’t minor. As Suno itself has admitted, the company trains its AI on copyrighted songs. The company argues that this is permissible according to fair use — a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission, but one that is highly fact-specific and can vary widely from case to case.
Copyright holders like Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony, and German music collection organization GEMA have continued to pursue legal action against Suno, though Warner Music Group (WMG) settled and reached a licensing deal with the company last November.
When Sony and UMG initially sued Suno in 2024, the companies claimed that Suno had trained on 560 of their copyrighted works. That number has since grown meaningfully. Last month, the record labels filed to amend their complaint to allege that over 61,000 more songs were used for AI training without permission.
None of that appears to be slowing Suno’s growth. It continues to hover around the top of the App Store charts for music, and at the time it was raising its Series C round, users were generating over 7 million songs on Suno every day, according to a pitch deck obtained by Billboard.
The Series D round was led by Bond Capital, alongside IVP, Forerunner, Union Square Ventures, Alkeon, and Quiet. Existing investors Matrix, Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures, and Schroders Capital also contributed. Suno says that it is “thrilled to have participation from some of the best artists, producers, songwriters, and people from across the music industry,” without disclosing any names.
The omission is notable; named artist endorsements would go a long way toward defusing the narrative that the music industry is uniformly opposed to what Suno is building.
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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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