Home A.I. Suno Raising Series D Funding Round After $250M Raise in November
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Suno Raising Series D Funding Round After $250M Raise in November

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Suno Raising Series D Funding Round After $250M Raise in November
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AI music company Suno is in the midst of a series D funding round, sources familiar with the raise tell Billboard. The news follows six months after Suno’s Series C round, which resulted in a $250 million raise, led by Menlo Ventures, bringing the AI music company’s valuation to $2.45 billion.

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Billboard Suno Feature Story. Clockwise from left: AI artist Xania Monet, created by Telisha Jones; AI artist Solomon Ray, created by Christopher Jermaine Townsend; AI music designer imoliver.

This round is expected to close in the coming weeks and will likely raise above the $250 million mark, as it is typical for funding rounds to continue to mount greater sums if the startup has continued to grow. According to a source familiar with the matter, multiple music industry investors are involved in the ongoing Series D round, and music industry investors have been putting money into each of Suno’s rounds, although most of them ultimately keep their support of the still-controversial AI music firm private. One notable exception to this is Hallwood Media, started by record executive Neil Jacobson, which made headlines last year by signing the first known record deals for talent who create music largely using Suno.

Little is known about how Suno plans to spend its money from the Series D round, but a look back at the investor materials for its Series C round, which Billboard obtained in the fall, noted that the company’s biggest expense since January 2024 was compute power — the hardware, processors, memory, storage and energy that operate data centers — which is expected for AI firms, looking to scale fast with the nascent and capital-intensive technology.

A pitch deck for the Series C round also revealed that the round would be allocated to 30% computing power; 20% mergers and acquisitions; 20% discovery; 20% marketing; 15% data; and 5% partnerships.

Since the Series C round was announced on Nov. 19, 2025, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group separately announced licensing deals and settlements with then-Suno competitor Udio, and as part of UMG’s particular agreement with Udio, the rival AI platform would pivot its business away from creating new AI-generated songs from simple text prompts, like Suno does, to being an AI-powered remixing platform for existing music.

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Around that same time, Suno announced a licensing deal and settlement with WMG, which included the acquisition of SongKick and the promise that it would limit user downloads of AI-generated songs and relaunch a model trained on licensed works in 2026. (This effectively ended WMG’s participation in the $500 million copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group, Sony Music and WMG in June 2024, which alleged that Suno trained on copyrighted sound recordings illegally. Sony and Universal are still pursuing that lawsuit.)

In January and February, it became increasingly clear that UMG and Suno did not see eye-to-eye on the future of AI music, and it was unlikely that their legal battle would resolve quickly. In a January episode of Billboard’s On the Record podcast, UMG chief digital officer and executive vp, Michael Nash, said that Suno’s disinterest in making its service into a so-called “walled garden,” where no songs can exit their own platform to be uploaded to streaming services, is a reason why their part of the lawsuit is still ongoing. “That’s kind of a hat-hanger in this discussion,” Nash said on the podcast.

Just days after Nash’s interview aired, Suno’s chief music officer Paul Sinclair took to LinkedIn to write a lengthy post called “Open Studios, Not Walled Gardens,” writing, “for [this] promise [of AI-led music innovation] to be real, these tools can’t just be toys inside a box.”

Most recently, a new Luminate survey found that U.S. consumer interest in listening to AI-assisted music declined across all age groups from when they were first surveyed in May 2025 to November 2025. Still, Suno recently became the No. 1 music app in the Apple app store and peaked at No. 11 across all categories, showing signs of its continued growth.


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