Stability AI

Stability AI Ltd is a London-headquartered artificial intelligence company best known for Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image model it released in August 2022. Beyond image generation, the company develops model families across video (Stable Video Diffusion), audio (Stable Audio, including Stable Audio 3.0), 3D and 4D (Stable TripoSR, Stable Point Aware 3D, Stable Fast 3D, Stable Video 3D, Stable Video 4D, Stable Zero 123), and text and code (Stable LM 2, Stable Code). Many model weights are published openly; the company's Hugging Face organization lists more than 100 models and 15 demo spaces, and its models are also distributed through third-party inference platforms such as Replicate and Amazon Bedrock.

The company positions itself as an enterprise-facing creative technology provider, targeting marketing, gaming and entertainment workflows. It markets image generation and editing tools for on-brand campaign assets, 3D and 4D video models for game world-building, and image and video tools spanning storyboarding through color grading. Delivery options include self-hosted deployment licenses, a managed application called Brand Studio for enterprise creative teams, an API, and a cloud service. Referenced customer examples include HubSpot, Mercado Libre and Stride Learning.

Stability AI has increasingly oriented its roadmap around licensed training data and rights-holder partnerships, releasing Stable Audio 3.0 in May 2026 as a model family trained on fully licensed data, and signing co-development agreements with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Electronic Arts before those companies invested in its 2026 Series B.

Founding story

Founded in 2019 by Emad Mostaque and Cyrus Hodes. The company rose to prominence in August 2022 with the release of Stable Diffusion, whose source and weights were made available publicly.

Business model

Stability AI monetizes its generative media models through multiple enterprise delivery channels: self-hosted deployment licenses for customers who want to run models in their own environment, a managed creative production application (Brand Studio) for enterprise teams, a hosted API for media generation and editing, and a cloud service. It also co-develops models with rights holders such as Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Electronic Arts using those companies' catalogues and intellectual property, and states it is expanding a professional services arm alongside its creative production product suite.

Licensing and subscription-style plans across self-hosted model licenses, the Brand Studio application, API access and a cloud service, complemented by professional services.

Traction

Models are widely used on third-party platforms: Replicate reports 111.1M runs for Stable Diffusion, 86.2M for SDXL, 21.2M for Stable Diffusion inpainting, 2.1M for SD3.5 Large and 86.4K for Stable Audio 2.5. On Hugging Face, the Stable Audio 3 2B post-trained model shows 58.6K downloads. Customer examples include HubSpot image generation, Mercado Libre reporting 25% higher click-through rates on product visuals, and Stride Learning launching a storytelling app in six months using Stable Diffusion on Amazon Bedrock at 1,000+ images per minute. Total funding reached $232 million as of August 2026.

Latest developments

On May 20, 2026 the company released Stable Audio 3.0, a model family trained on fully licensed data with open weights, followed on August 18, 2026 by a DAW plugin and an advanced generation experience on StableAudio.com. On August 25, 2026 it announced a $76 million Series B from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Electronic Arts, AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures, with returning backers including Greycroft, Kadmos Capital, Coatue, Eric Schmidt and Sean Parker; Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont joined the board. Proceeds are earmarked for the creative production product suite and an expanded professional services division. In November 2025 the High Court of England and Wales ruled that Stability AI was not guilty of copyright infringement in Getty Images' UK case.