Suno, the AI music generator, has never said it intends to go public. Yet Music Business Worldwide argues the company is assembling the pieces a listing would need: a first chief financial officer, three licensing partners, more than $775 million raised in total, and a valuation of $5.4 billion. Standing in the way is a stack of copyright cases, two of them brought by the biggest record companies, that no prospectus could skip.
The hiring is the first signal. A listing for a senior finance role, which MBW spotted in July, asked its future holder to guide Suno through its first-year financial statement audit and to build controls fit for IPO readiness. On 14 September Cherry Miao announced she had joined as the company's first CFO. She was most recently CFO at the data company Hightouch, and earlier spent five years at the commerce software firm Lightspeed, growing it ahead of its 2019 Toronto listing. A company with over two million paying subscribers hiring a finance chief is ordinary on its own, MBW notes, but it reads differently beside that job spec and beside a rival's move.
That rival is ElevenLabs, which on 8 September appointed Adyen's former CFO, who had helped take that payments firm public in 2018. The Information reported that the hire was made with a possible 2028 IPO in mind. On 30 September ElevenLabs completed a $300 million employee tender at a $22 billion valuation, more than four times Suno's. The two are also drifting into each other's territory: ElevenLabs started in voice and moved into music, while Suno opened a public beta of a Speech model on 1 October that produces spoken voice and background music as one track. The difference is that ElevenLabs' chief executive has openly talked of heading toward an IPO, while Suno has offered no intention and no timeline.
Suno's backers also look like people who have seen companies reach the bell. The Series D of more than $400 million, raised in June, was led by Bond Capital. IVP, Union Square Ventures and Forerunner came in as new investors, alongside Alkeon and Quiet, with Matrix, Lightspeed, Menlo and Schroders also named. The round lifted the valuation from $2.45 billion, where a $250 million raise in November 2025 had put it. Later-stage funds like Bond and IVP typically back fast-growing companies in the years before a listing. MBW's reading is that such investors price their stakes assuming an exit.
“v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”
the labels' complaint against Suno, in the second lawsuit · musicbusinessworldwide.com ↗
On the numbers, Suno passed two million paying subscribers in February with roughly $300 million in annual recurring revenue, and says over 100 million people have used it. Speaking at Bloomberg's Screentime conference on 1 October, co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman said the business was now far beyond both figures, but he gave nothing new.
The licensing story moved in stages. Warner Music Group settled in November 2025 and licensed Suno. BMG followed in August and Believe in September, and Suno also capped monthly downloads and committed to watermarking and fingerprinting. The v6 model, launched on 9 September, is described as trained from scratch on different data from its predecessors, using music licensed from those partners plus data from its users. Every earlier model was retired the same day, and Suno's product chief told MBW that part of revenue will go to the partners.
Universal and Sony remain plaintiffs, though. The case the three majors began in June 2024 in a Boston federal court now covers about 560 recordings, a theoretical ceiling near $84 million. The labels asked in May to add 61,026 more recordings, and on 18 August the judge declined, pointing them to a separate suit, while allowing a claim that Suno circumvented protections by scraping YouTube. In its 1 September answer, Suno admitted it obtained audio from YouTube for training with the YT-DLP tool, and argues fair use as well as innocent infringement, which it says could cut damages sharply. The labels duly filed that second suit on 18 September, over 60,202 recordings and a ceiling just over $9 billion, and it targets v6 itself, arguing that training on an infringing model's outputs launders the infringement. Suno calls the claims flawed on the facts and the law, and says v6 learned partly from its community's creations and preference signals.
Other actions keep arriving. A Munich court ruled against Suno on 31 July in the GEMA case, the first European decision on a generative music tool; it applied US law, rejected fair use and ordered revenue disclosure, though Suno is weighing an appeal. Round Hill Music sued on 17 August and says it will not settle, Gerencia 360 on 31 August, and Canada's SOCAN on 2 September. Jason Isbell and others filed a proposed class action built on identity and biometric claims rather than copyright. Its argument is that a label's right to license a recording does not by itself give an AI company the right to use the performer's voice or likeness, and that Warner's own deal protects only participating artists, not musicians such as Isbell. Italy's competition authority opened an investigation on 6 October into Suno's terms of service, including a content licence it says forces users to waive moral rights. Denmark's Koda has a case of its own. The Munich judgment is not final, but it is a court finding of infringement that already rejects the defence Suno runs in Boston. Suno also asked the court to keep the size of its training data sealed.
Suno's hero artwork released with its Series D funding announcement
Suno · Image: MusicTech
Universal's stance adds an irony. The world's largest music company has been licensing across the AI field while still suing Suno: it settled with Udio and licensed it in October 2025, struck deals with Spotify, Nvidia and KLAY, signed a multi-year agreement with ElevenLabs two days after that company's CFO hire, and joined the other majors in taking equity in Stability AI. Sony has settled with neither Suno nor Udio, and sued Udio a second time in July. MBW suggests that a rightsholder wanting a ruling more than a payout makes any settlement harder to price.
MBW points out that litigation has not always blocked a listing. Spotify direct-listed in 2018 days after being sued for at least $1.6 billion by Wixen, and Anthropic and OpenAI have both confidentially filed while defending copyright suits. But Suno's case differs, since it is fighting two major labels over the very material its models were built on, and an S-1 would have to describe unresolved claims it cannot yet put a figure on. Under US accounting rules, a loss that becomes probable and estimable moves from the notes into the accounts, which is why a fair-use loss would matter.
Several differences set Suno apart from those precedents. Spotify listed holding licences from all three majors, and the works in dispute against Anthropic and OpenAI are a small part of what their general-purpose models learned from. Suno is in court with two of the biggest recorded-music companies over the core material behind its product. The labels say the recordings in the new suit are only a small portion of the works Suno infringed, and the ceiling there, just over $9 billion, sits well above the $5.4 billion valuation.
A prospectus would also have to list the Italian probe, the German finding, the identity claims that recording licences do not cover, the $1 billion-scale claim from Round Hill and a training dataset the company has fought to keep sealed. When v6 replaced the older models, some of the first case's exposure turned into the price of past conduct. The second suit puts today's product in the frame, and that is harder to price.
The calendar is slow. Fact discovery in the first case largely ended on 30 September, and on 22 September the deadline for dispositive motions slid to 22 June 2027, so a fair-use ruling is unlikely before the second half of that year. For now Suno is a company growing quickly and licensing where it can, while the biggest questions about how its music was made go on in court.
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