Suno Series B: $125M Raise, 10M Users and Label Lawsuits

A round sized for a category that barely existed

Suno announced on May 21, 2024 that it had raised $125 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Matrix and Founder Collective. The company said the round came eight months after its first product shipped and that 10 million people had used it to make a song by that point. [1]

The announcement itself did not state a valuation. TechCrunch, reporting on Suno's next round eighteen months later, put the May 2024 figure at roughly $500 million. [6]

Text-to-song was not an established category with a going rate for a Series B in May 2024. Suno's product had been broadly usable for five months. A nine-figure round at a roughly half-billion valuation, from a lineup of investors that included two of the highest-profile individual backers in AI at the time, set the scale other music generation startups would be measured against rather than following one that already existed. [1][6]

Out of Kensho, into ten million users

Suno was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2022 by Mikey Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho and Keenan Freyberg, all previously of the financial analytics company Kensho. The product became broadly accessible in December 2023, and by the time of the May 2024 round the company reported 10 million people had made a song. [2]

Ten million users in roughly five months of broad availability is a fast climb for a paid creative tool, and it is the number the round leaned on more than any technical claim. The team's background was in financial modeling, not music, which made the user count rather than a pedigree in audio research the essential evidence for the investment. [2][1]

The labels' answer

On June 24, 2024, a little over a month after the round closed, the Recording Industry Association of America backed separate lawsuits against Suno and Udio, filed in federal courts in Boston and New York, alleging the companies had trained their models on unauthorized copies of copyrighted recordings. Suno's response, filed that August, argued the training was fair use: its chief executive said "Learning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is not now," comparing the process to a kid writing rock songs after listening to the genre. The RIAA rejected that framing, calling the practice industrial scale infringement. [3][4]

The suit landed while the ink on the Series B was barely dry, and neither side treated the other's argument as new: Suno's investors had backed a company whose entire training approach was already an open target, and the RIAA's theory of infringement was aimed at the same scraped catalog that had produced the ten million songs the round was built on. The two events describe the same underlying fact from opposite sides of a courtroom. [3][1]

The litigation did not slow the money

Warner Music Group settled its case against Suno in November 2025, licensing its catalog to the company and gaining control over how artists' names, images and voices are used in Suno-generated output; Universal Music Group and Sony Music's separate suits were still pending at the time. Days later, Suno raised $250 million led by Menlo Ventures at a $2.45 billion valuation, with the company reporting $200 million in annual revenue. [5][6]

Eighteen months after the RIAA suit was filed, Suno's valuation had grown roughly fivefold with the largest label lawsuit still open rather than resolved in its favor by a court. The pattern the May 2024 round started held: investors kept pricing Suno on usage and revenue, and the labels' leverage showed up in licensing terms rather than in a valuation discount. [5][6]