Suno launches public web app

Suno, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup founded by four former engineers at the fintech AI company Kensho — Mikey Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho and Keenan Freyberg — opened its AI song-generation web app to the public. The tool converts a short text prompt into a complete song, with vocals, lyrics, instrumentation and structure generated in roughly a minute, a step beyond earlier instrumental-only or short-clip music generators.

The public launch coincided with a partnership with Microsoft, which added Suno as a plugin inside Copilot, letting users generate a song from a text prompt directly within Microsoft’s assistant — a distribution route that gave the young startup access to a mainstream audience well beyond the Discord community it had built the tool with.

Suno’s launch anticipated a fight that would define the next two years of AI music: within months, competitor Udio launched with similar capability, and in 2024 the major record labels — Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Records — sued both companies for copyright infringement over training data. Suno’s co-founder Shulman said the company preferred working with the music industry rather than against it; by 2026 Suno had reached a settlement with Warner while litigation with Sony continued, and its valuation had risen sharply even as artists’ groups criticised the company’s approach to licensing.