Highlights:

  • This is Stability AI’s first acquisition since going public. It comes after reports that the startup is looking to raise money at a four-billion-dollar valuation surfaced a few days ago.
  • The different Clipdrop versions have accumulated a combined installed base of 15 million users, according to a report released recently by Stability AI.

The startup that created the Stable Diffusion generative artificial intelligence model, Stability AI Ltd., recently announced that it has acquired the photo editing service provider, Init ML.

This is Stability AI’s first acquisition since going public. It comes after reports that the startup is looking to raise money at a four-billion-dollar valuation surfaced a few days ago. When it closed a USD 101 million funding round in October, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, and O’Shaughnessy Ventures, Stability AI was worth four times as much as it is now.

The creator of Stable Diffusion is London-based Stability AI. Stable Diffusion is an AI model that can automatically produce images based on text prompts. Not all AI models have that capability. However, it can run on reasonably basic hardware and is open-source, two features that have assisted it in rapidly gaining a sizable user base.

In October of last year, Stability AI revealed that it had amassed 1 million users after launching Stable Diffusion. Around 200,000 developers downloaded the AI model’s source code in the same period. The purchase of Init ML might enable Stability AI to increase the number of installed users.

A 2020 startup named Init ML offers a program called Clipdrop that employs AI to automate two typical photo-editing tasks. In addition to cropping specific portions of an image and erasing the background, Clipdrop can automatically improve the fidelity of low-resolution images.

Users of Init ML’s software can engage with it in various ways. Additionally, being a Photoshop plugin, Clipdrop is accessible on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and the web. The different Clipdrop versions have accumulated a combined installed base of 15 million users, according to a report released recently by Stability AI.

Before the acquisition, Paris-based Init ML received seed funding from Air Street Capital. As a result of the agreement, the startup will operate as a separate business division of Stability AI. Init ML intends to combine its software with the most recent neural networks from Stability AI to improve its capabilities.

Emad Mostaque, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Stability AI, said, “This acquisition will provide Clipdrop with the resources it needs to advance the next era of generative AI, marking a new milestone in our shared journey to democratize the power of AI and multimodal foundation models in creative workflows,”

The Stability AI product portfolio’s two current offerings will be complemented by Clipdrop. The startup offers an API that makes it simpler for programmers to incorporate Stable Diffusion into their applications. Additionally, it provides DreamStudio, a program that lets users use Stable Diffusion without having to write any code.