Suno, the AI music production company, announced Wednesday that it has raised one $400 million Series D roundvaluing the company at $5.4 billion. Just about seven months ago, Suno raised a $2.45 billion valuation, underscoring that investors are confident about the company’s future despite the differences it faces.
This legal problem is not small. As Suno itself has admitted, the company is training its AI on copyrighted songs. The company argues that this is permissible under fair use — a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission, but is very fact-specific and can vary widely from case to case.
Copyright holders such as Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony and German music collection organization GEMA continued to take legal action against Suno, although 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 significantly. Last month, the labels filed to amend their complaint to allege that it ended 61,000 more songs were used to train artificial intelligence without permission.
None of this seems to be slowing down Suno’s growth. It continues to hover atop the App Store charts for music, and at the time it raised its Series C round, users were creating over 7 million songs on Suno every day, according to a pitch deck obtained by Bulletin board.
The Series D round was led by Bond Capital, along with IVP, Forerunner, Union Square Ventures, Alkeon and Quiet. Existing investors Matrix, Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures and Schroders Capital also contributed. Suno says he’s “excited to have some of the best artists, producers, songwriters and people from around the music industry on board,” without disclosing any names.
The omission is notable. Named artist endorsements would go a long way in defusing the narrative that the music industry is uniformly antithetical to what Suno is building.
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