Read the email Stability AI leaders sent employees announcing layoffs

  • Stability AI is laying off employees following CEO Emad Mostaque's resignation.

  • The company told workers in an email that it needed to "right-size parts of the business."

  • The email was sent on Wednesday night by Stability AI's COO and CTO.

Stability AI is laying off employees less than a month after Emad Mostaque resigned as its CEO.

Workers were notified on Wednesday night in an email sent by chief operating officer Shan Shan Wong and chief technology officer Christian Laforte and obtained by Business Insider.

Stability AI's leaders said the job cuts were a result of needing to "right-size parts of the business" and "focus" its operations following efforts over the past few weeks to cut costs.

The company completed a funding round that valued it at $1 billion in 2022. It has monthly expenses of $8 million and had $5.4 million in revenue in February, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed sources. It had $3 million in revenue in November.

It's not clear how many roles are being cut, but Stability had nearly 200 employees as of October.

Mostaque said he was exiting to "fix" the "concentration of power in AI" when he announced his departure in an X post in March.

According to Fortune, its investor Coatue became concerned and tried to oust Mostaque after Forbes reported in June that he'd overstated his academic and career achievements. Mostaque has denied those claims.

The British startup is also contending with a lawsuit from Getty Images, filed in January 2023, which claimed Stability AI "scraped" its copyrighted images to train its text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. The company denied the claims in filings with the High Court in London.

Stability AI declined to comment.

Read a copy of the email below:

Dear team,

As you know, over the past couple of weeks the Leadership team have been working hard on a strategic plan to reduce our cost-base, strengthen support with our investors and partners, and enable our team to continue developing and releasing innovative products.

Following a review of the global team, we have determined the need to restructure parts of the business, which sadly mean saying goodbye to some colleagues. Those who are affected by this have been notified individually and we will be supporting them throughout this period.

These decisions have not been taken lightly and they are intended to right-size parts of the business and focus our operations, which is critical to setting us on a more sustainable path - and to put us in the best possible position to continue developing cutting-edge models and products. Products like Stable Diffusion 3 API & Stable Assistant Beta strengthen our deep-tech leadership and demonstrate our unique, systemic importance to the AI ecosystem.

We will meet as planned on Thursday for our regular town hall and we encourage you to ask any questions you might have of our Leadership team in the form that will be sent out shortly. In the meantime, please feel free to discuss any concerns with your manager.

We would like to thank everyone for their dedication and contributions. We recognise the challenges we face, but we have a plan in place. Through the hard work and commitment of this team, we are making progress every day, moving us steadily in the right direction.

Best wishes, Shan Shan & Christian


Do you work at Stability AI? Get in touch: jmann@businessinsider.com

Read the original article on Business Insider