Cyrus sold a stake in his company for $100 that was soon worth millions. He says he was tricked

A Stability AI co-founder has sued the company, claiming he was tricked into selling his stake for $US100 ($145) months before the British artificial intelligence start-up hit a $US1 billion ($1.5 billion) valuation.

Cyrus Hodes said he sold his 15 per cent stake in Stability AI to another co-founder, Emad Mostaque, in two transactions in October 2021 and May 2022, according to a federal lawsuit filed in San Francisco. Hodes alleges that Mostaque had led him to believe the company was “essentially worthless.”

By August 2022, Stability AI had unveiled Stable Diffusion, an image creation tool, and announced $US101 million in venture capital funding, vaulting the start-up to the forefront of the red-hot generative AI sector, according to the suit. Hodes accused Mostaque, who’s also the company’s chief executive officer, of violating fiduciary duties.

“In an act of self-dealing by a faithless fiduciary, Mostaque brazenly deceived Hodes about the core business of Stability AI that Mostaque was developing, its likely valuation, and its fundraising,” according to the lawsuit.

In a statement, Stability AI said, “The suit is without merit and we will aggressively defend our position.”

Mostaque, a former hedge fund employee, registered Stability AI in the UK in 2019. He and Hodes, a former adviser to the United Arab Emirates and previous AI program director at Harvard University, first began working on a project in early 2020 called Collective and Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19, or CAIAC, meant to provide public agencies with useful data on the pandemic. Over the next year, Hodes spent more than $US15,000 of his own money to cover company expenses, according to the lawsuit.

Stability AI missed the deadline for the CAIAC project. In the suit, Hodes alleged that this was because Mostaque was “secretly diverting” resources to work on a text-to-image generator — the product that eventually became Stable Diffusion. Mostaque has previously blamed insufficient funding for failing to meet the project’s goals.

Hodes is the second Stability AI co-founder to claim he wasn’t fairly compensated in a lawsuit.