Stability AI is losing one of its leading members of technical staff, Sifted has learnt from two sources close to the company.
Research scientist Robin Rombach, who joined the London-based startup in 2022, is departing from his leadership role on Stability's scientific and research team.
Rombach was one of the two academics from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who developed the image generation model Stable Diffusion — the technology that helped Stability AI raise a $101m Series A round from Lightspeed and Coatue in 2022.
Stability has been closely associated with the development of Stable Diffusion — the company helped finance the costs of training it — but it was not involved in the technical work of building the model. The Heidelberg University graduate's exit, therefore, represents the departure of a significant person responsible for the tech that helped make the company famous.
“We would like to thank Robin for his contribution to Stability AI and wish him the very best in his future endeavours,” a Stability spokesperson tells Sifted, adding that the company remains “focused on commercialising our world leading technology”.
Rombach’s departure follows a turbulent 12 months for the company’s technical team which has seen it replace its CTO and lose a VP of product, a VP of engineering, a VP of R&D, a head of research and two large language model leads.
Rombach has not yet commented publicly on his decision to leave Stability.
