The failure came first. In 2019 Emad Mostaque started a company called Symmitree to cut the cost of technology for people living in poverty. It did not work, and the two co-founders later gave conflicting accounts of why. It is almost never mentioned alongside the billion-dollar valuation that followed.
He was born in Jordan in 1983 to a Bengali Muslim family, moved as an infant to Dhaka and came to the UK at seven. He studied mathematics and computer science at Oxford, met his future wife at 19 on a student trip to the US, and has said he was diagnosed with Asperger's and ADHD. In his twenties he built online forums for Muslim communities and floated an idea of an Islamic AI to guide religious life. He worked as a hedge fund manager in crude oil, and advised governments on Middle East affairs.
He said he wanted to pursue decentralised AI; reports said investors pushed him out.
Then, in Covid, he and Cyrus Hodes led a big-data effort to support government decisions. They co-founded Stability AI, and Mostaque took the chief executive job.
What almost nobody expected was how fast it would blow up. In August 2022 the company released Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model that grew from research by groups at LMU Munich and Heidelberg. It was open for anyone to use. That year Stability raised $101m at a $1bn valuation, led by Coatue and Lightspeed.
The cost arrived within a year. In June 2023 Forbes, citing more than 30 sources, reported that Mostaque had misled people about his education, an AWS partnership and his role in Stable Diffusion; he answered on his blog. In July 2023 Hodes sued, claiming he had been tricked into selling a 15% stake for $100. The company called it seller's remorse. Artists sued. Getty sued. In October 2023 Lightspeed wrote that his mismanagement had severely undermined its confidence.
On 23 March 2024 Mostaque resigned. He said he wanted to pursue decentralised AI; reports said investors pushed him out. Prem Akkaraju, formerly of Weta Digital, became CEO in June 2024, with Sean Parker as executive chairman, and James Cameron joined the board in September.
In November 2025 the UK High Court ruled that Stability AI did not infringe copyright in the Getty case, and a $76m Series B followed in 2026, while US suits continue.
The lesson is in the order of events. A failed small company and an enormous public one share a founder. The second did not erase the first; it raised the cost of every claim he made.