Suno’s Hit Factory

Today, Lightspeed is announcing that we’re leading a Series B in Suno, the company that’s building a future where anyone can make music. Founded by lifelong musicians and aspiring technologists Mikey Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg, Suno has now raised a total of $125M, enabling the team to accelerate the development of its state-of-the-art music creation model and consumption platform. We at Lightspeed are thrilled to support Suno on this next phase of their journey alongside other investors like Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Matrix, Founder Collective, Aravind Srinivas, Aaron Levie, Andrej Karpathy, Demi Guo, and other luminaries from AI, startups, and music.

All humans are inherently creative. Smartphones and the internet have made expressing that creativity much easier: Billions of people now create videos on platforms like YouTube, photos on platforms like Instagram, and writing on platforms like X. Each time a new medium becomes democratized, the potential for that medium expands, elevating both the existing creators in that space and inviting millions more to participate. Democratization of creativity also leads to market expansion, helping creators of all sizes – from pros to beginners – to earn money and potentially make a living off their art.

However, the creation of music, a medium that’s consumed by nearly everyone on the planet, remains inaccessible to most. But generative AI changes this equation. AI is yet another amazing innovation in the evolution of music creation, much like digital audio workstations, synthesizers, turntables, and electric guitars before it. At their introduction, each of those tools were decried as not being for “real musicians”, only to become mainstream and enable many more people to express themselves than before their existence.

Recent advancements in transformer and diffusion-based AI model architectures have made it possible for anyone to create music through the same types of inputs and devices that creators leverage to express themselves through other mediums. And while AI-powered music creation may be inevitable, Suno is the company leading the charge towards a future that enables anyone to create and share their work.

The Suno founders all met during their days at Kensho, the financial artificial intelligence company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eventually, the four realized they had something else in common: a shared passion for making music, which ultimately inspired them to chase Suno’s mission together.

As one example, CEO Mikey Shulman had spent years of his life playing in bands, recording, and gigging in New York City, experiencing first hand just how challenging it was for most people – including people who had mastered learning the craft – to make music and get it heard. This perspective not only inspired them to want to lower the barrier for aspiring artists, but to also raise the ceiling of what’s possible for everyone: by helping people create original music with AI. When we at Lightspeed met the Suno team, it was clear to us that the Suno team was not just building some of the most advanced AI music technology in the world, but on a mission to make the world’s most popular medium more inclusive, creative, and rewarding for everyone involved.

Suno has accomplished a lot in a very short amount of time. Since their product went live only a few months ago, more than 10M people have been able to express their creativity by making  music on Suno. One of the world’s biggest companies, Microsoft, has integrated Suno directly in their AI-powered Copilot software. And Suno’s latest AI model, version 3, can generate full length songs worthy of top 40 radio airplay in mere seconds (like this one, a song about Suno made with Suno, of course). If Suno can do all that in a few months on a budget, we can’t imagine what they can accomplish with this new funding, a growing team of the world’s most talented and music-obsessed people, and a product roadmap that will reinvent the way we all experience music.

Suno is shifting the world of music towards one in which more and more people can express their creativity through music. If you want to get started making your own music, head over to Suno.com. And if you want to join the Suno team, they’re hiring for a number of high-impact roles right now.