Suno Teardown — How Mikey Shulman's $500M AI Music Bet Created the RIAA's Nightmare

The Song That Started a Lawsuit

In December 2023, a Suno user typed eleven words into a text box: "a soulful gospel song about heartbreak in the style of Marvin Gaye." Forty seconds later, a complete two-minute track played back through their laptop speakers. The user posted it to Twitter. By morning the clip had three million views and a thread under it asking the same question in different forms: how is this legal?

Six months later, on June 24, 2024, the Recording Industry Association of America answered the question by suing Suno in federal court in Boston. The complaint, filed jointly with Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records, asked for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed. The spreadsheet listed 662 songs. The math came to roughly $99 million.

This is a teardown of how Suno became the most-talked-about AI startup of 2024, hit $30M ARR, raised $125M at a $500M valuation, and simultaneously walked into the most aggressive copyright lawsuit the music industry has filed against a tech company since Napster.

The Kensho Four

The Suno story does not begin in a garage. It begins inside a company called Kensho Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kensho built ML systems for S&P Global. In 2018, S&P bought Kensho for $550 million.

Four of Kensho's machine learning researchers stayed on through the acquisition. Mikey Shulman had a PhD in physics from Harvard. Georg Kucsko had a PhD in physics from Harvard. Martin Camacho had a PhD in physics from Harvard. Keenan Freyberg had a PhD in physics. They had spent five years building deep learning systems that did extremely well-defined things to extremely structured data. They wanted to build something that did poorly-defined things to extremely unstructured data. They wanted to work on audio.

In 2022, they left and started Suno. The company's first product was not a song generator. It was a speech model — text-to-speech and speech-to-text — and it was good enough that they got a contract with Microsoft, who licensed the technology into Copilot. That contract p