London-based AI unicorn Stability has laid off about a tenth of its workforce as part of a “strategic plan to reduce” costs just weeks after the departure of its founder and CEO.
The layoffs, affecting around 20 staff, were announced by Stability in a company-wide memo on Wednesday evening, first published by Business Insider.
The memo said the decision was made “following a review of the global team” that determined there was a “need to restructure parts of the business”.
“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,” the memo read.
The redundancies follow the departure of company founder and former CEO Emad Mostaque and several high-profile executives.
Mostaque left the company, which develops AI visual and audio generation tools, in March. Stability said he resigned to focus on “decentralised AI” ventures.
Stability is currently being run by COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte, who are both serving as interim co-CEOs.
The firm has seen numerous senior leadership exits in the past year, such as former VP of audio Ed Newton-Rex, who resigned after disagreeing with the company’s position on using copyrighted material for AI model training.
Other recent departures include Robin Rombach, one of the original developers of the firm’s flagship Stable Diffusion product, and former CTO Tom Mason.
Stability declined to comment on the layoffs at the time of publication.
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