Suno: The AI studio turning prompts into platinum-level tracks

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup. 

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead.

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email:

• 📊 This startup is building an AI tool that turns prompts into entire AI songs and radio-quality music tracks 

• 📈 They’ve hit $150M+ in ARR and have crossed 50M+ users - one song alone on Suno has 3M+ plays

• 💰 To date, they’ve raised $125M+ and scaled from ~8 people to ~100 over the last 2 years

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Suno 📈

Suno is a text-to-music platform founded by Mikey Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg in 2023. 

The tool turns a short prompt into a fully produced song - vocals, instrumentation, structure, the works, in seconds. 

Their mission: make music a bigger, more valuable part of life for billions, moving people from passive listening to active creation. 

As CEO Mikey Shulman puts it: “We’re not making music; we’re making musicians.” 

Fun fact: The name “Suno” means “to listen” in Punjabi/Hindi. 🎧

How it actually works (🤖 + 🎼):

• Tokenize the sound: Audio is continuous (~50,000 samples/sec). Suno compresses it into a smarter, discrete representation (~50 tokens/sec), similar to MP3-like compression - small enough to model, rich enough to sound real.
  

• Autoregressive Transformer: Like predicting the next token in text, Suno predicts the next tiny slice of audio, building melody, harmony, arrangements piece-by-piece.
  

• Data curation: They care about metadata (genre, lyrics, timestamps, bit depth, sample rate, “vibes”), which is notoriously messy in the wild.
  

• Preference tuning (💖 RLHF ish): When users generate two takes, Suno watches which one people like or listen longer to - then steers models toward human taste.
  

Think of it as a junior producer on standby 24/7 - you describe the mood, tempo, and genre; Suno handles composition, sound design, and vocal performance.

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Backstory 👀

All four founders - Mikey, Georg, Martin, and Keenan, met while working at Kensho in Cambridge, MA (acquired by S&P Global). 

They were working on NLP, and their only audio project was the least sexy thing imaginable: transcribing earnings calls. 💤

But that mundane workflow hid a revelation. By grappling with voice data, they realized sound was more interesting than text - messier, richer, more human.

Audio tech was “so far behind” text (roughly two years, a GPT-2-era gap). That delta felt like an opportunity too loud to ignore. 🔊

At first, they assumed the sensible path: build a general audio understanding or speech company (huge market, clear buyer). Then the gravity of music pulled them off orbit. 

They started staying up all night, “playing with the product in an abusive way,” hacking their speech models to hum, whistle, and sing. Those sleepless experiments were the moment the team decided to go all-in on Suno. 🌙🎶

Their first public spark was Bark (open-sourced April 2023): a text-to-speech model aimed at open-ended, emotional delivery.

Hesitations, throat clears, the little human ticks that make voices feel alive. 

The internet, predictably, tried to make music with Bark, and the founders followed the usage curve straight into full-stack text-to-music. 🗣️→🎵

Crucially, timing and tooling broke their way. They expected that “good generative” would take years and massive scale.

What looked like a long trek suddenly became a sprint, and the team seized it.

The Hustle 🤑

Early Suno lived inside Discord. 

Then a thin web app dropped and ~90% of traffic moved in five days. 

From there came iOS and Android; the product shifted from “fun demo” to everyday creative tool, right on your phone.

They layered in features that feel like game mechanics for music:

• Covers/Remix to re-imagine a track in new styles.
  

• Extend to stitch on more music in the same vibe.
  

• Personas to capture and transfer the essence of one track to the next.
  

• Multimodal creation: hum a melody, tap a beat, or upload everyday sounds.

On the pro side, Suno acquired WavTool, bringing DAW-grade power in the backend. 

Monetization was (and still is) straightforward & sticky: 

1. A free tier with 50 credits/day (~10 songs) for play

2. Pro ($10/mo) for ownership + commercial rights (hello, Spotify/YouTube), priority generation, and bigger credit allotments (up to 2,500 credits, ~500 songs/day).

3. Premier ($30/mo) for the same ownership + commercial rights, and massive credit allotments (up to 10,000 credits, ~2,000 songs/day). 

No surprise that ~50% of first-day users hit the paywall.

Stats 📊

Fast forward to today, Suno released Suno Studio on Sep 25, 2025 - the first generative audio workstation that lets creators instantly generate and remix stems.

Suno’s biggest track “Stone” by imoliver crossed 3M+ streams and scored a Hallwood Media record deal.

Suno grew from just 8 people to 2 years ago → 40 people beginning of 2025 → over 100 people now.

📈 The AI music startup now has over 50M people having made music on the app, up from 25M only a few months ago.

💸 According to Arfur Rock on X, Suno is at $150M ARR, up 4x YoY, only 2 years after launch. This could place them in the top 15 most valuable private startups out there pretty soon.

💰️ In May 2024, Suno raised a $125M Series B at a $500M valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners, with participation from other investors including Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Founder Collective, Amjad Masad, and others.

The Opportunity 🚀

Music is a universal language, but the tools have long been gate-kept by training, time, or money. Suno collapses that gap through 3 waves:

1. Creation unlock: If LLMs made everyone a writer, Suno makes everyone a producer. A billion people can now express emotion in sound, not just text.
   

2. New formats: Suno Studio collapses the wall between generation and editing. Stems + MIDI + BPM control let hobbyists ship tracks that stand up in pro workflows.
   

3. Social/multiplayer (coming): Think Google Docs for songs: turn-based collabs, “pass the beat,” synchronous jamming (with guardrails like voice-cloning controls). The flywheel is obvious: creation → sharing → remix → culture.

If they keep marrying taste (preference data) with control (Studio, recording inputs, personas), Suno can own the creative stack, from idea → iteration → release.

They can become the default place people make, share, and monetize music.

How creators get the most out of Suno 🎛️

• Prompt like a producer: Mix 3 genres + 3 descriptors (e.g., “jazz-reggae-EDM; warm, cinematic, halftime”) and spell out the topic/story.
  

• Iterate: Generate → tweak: “Second chorus needs to hit harder,” “add a violin counter-melody,” “slower BPM.”
  

• Custom Mode: Create your own lyrics for tighter storytelling.
  

• The “Plaque” hack: Edit on-screen lyrics into a short context blurb about the inspiration - it makes the song feel deeper to listeners.
  

• Capture life (mobile): Hum hooks, tap rhythms, sample daily sounds (construction clanks, coffee-cup percussion) to create personal fingerprints.
  

• Level up to Studio: Export stems & MIDI and finish in your favorite DAW, or just stay in Suno Studio for an end-to-end workflow.

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