Prem Akkaraju is the CEO of Stability AI, the company best known for its creation of breakthrough foundational model Stable Diffusion (SD). In 2023, Stability AI made “TIME100 Most Influential Companies” and generated a staggering 80% of all AI images online. SD models have been downloaded over 150 million times.

Prem Akkaraju most recently served as CEO of Weta Digital, the multi-billion-dollar, multi-national Academy Award-winning film production and visual effects company. Weta Digital is behind 80+ major studio films, which have generated over $22 billion in global box office, including Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther, Avengers Endgame, Lord of the Rings, The Batman, and The Hobbit.

During his CEO tenure at Weta, Mr. Akkaraju founded Weta Cloud, a robust cloud-based film production pipeline which sold to Unity Software for $1.625 billion in an asset sale transaction. The asset sale included the technology group, software, and certain trademarks (including the name Weta Digital).

Mr. Akkaraju’s leadership and extraordinary value creation marks one of the highest shareholder returns in modern film history, including all studios, production companies, exhibitors, and streaming platforms.

Previously, Mr. Akkaraju was the Co-Founder and CEO of Screening Room, a proprietary feature film security and content delivery platform. Investors in Screening Room included Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, JJ Abrams, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Oracle Corporation, and Skydance Media. The company was founded alongside Sean Parker (Spotify, Facebook).

Mr. Akkaraju is an inventor of 26 issued technology patents, all involving cinema-quality movie delivery.

Prior to Screening Room, Mr. Akkaraju was the Chief Content Officer (CCO) of SFX Entertainment. As CCO, he oversaw all film and TV production and distribution. The content he distributed online generated over a billion views on first and third-party sites, and TV and film projects were released on MTV International and Netflix. Mr. Akkaraju, alongside the CEO and CFO, executed the full roadshow and took SFX Entertainment public on the NASDAQ. The $265 million IPO was priced at a $1 billion valuation.

Mr. Akkaraju was an Executive Producer on the 2021 Oscar-nominated feature film, The White Tiger. The film was theatrically released and hit #1 in 64 countries around the world on Netflix.

He is currently on the Board of Directors of four venture-backed companies: Stability AI (investors include Coatue, Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Lightspeed, and Sound Ventures); Citizen (an AI security app, investors include Sequoia, 8VC, and Goodwater); Cantina (an AI social media app, investors include Founders Fund and Google Ventures); and Screening Room (a movie security and delivery enterprise solution, investors include SV Angel and Oracle).

He also was a Keynote speaker at the March 2022 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Mr. Akkaraju has an MBA from Columbia Business School (2004) and a double BA in Applied Mathematics and Economics from the University of New Mexico (1996).