Black Forest Labs

Extracted Attributes

• CEO

  Robin Rombach

• Founders

  Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser

• Industry

  Artificial Intelligence / Generative Visual Media

• Valuation

  $3.25 billion USD (as of February 2026)

• Company Size

  70 employees (as of 2026)

• Core Product

  Flux (FLUX.1) text-to-image and image-to-image models

• Founded Date

  2024-08-01

• Headquarters

  Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

• Total Funding

  $300 million Series B (February 2026) and $31 million initial seed funding

Timeline

• Black Forest Labs officially launches and introduces the FLUX.1 suite of text-to-image models alongside an initial seed investment of $31 million. (Source: undefined)

  2024-08-01

• Black Forest Labs raises $300 million in Series B financing at a $3.25 billion valuation to advance multimodal AI intelligence systems. (Source: undefined)

  2026-02-01

Flux (text-to-image model)

Flux is a family of text-to-image and image-to-image models developed by Black Forest Labs (BFL), based in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Black Forest Labs was founded by former employees of Stability AI. As with other text-to-image models, Flux generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts. In addition, some Flux models support editing images.

Web Search Results

• Black Forest Labs: Funding, Team & Investors | Startup Intros

  Black Forest Labs is a generative artificial intelligence company based in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, that develops advanced text-to-image and video creation models. The organization operates on a freemium business model, providing open-weight visual AI systems alongside commercial enterprise licenses and a low-latency application programming interface. Its proprietary Flux models currently power the core image generation capabilities for major technology platforms and productivity applications, including enterprise customers like Meta and Canva. The company has raised significant capital across multiple rounds, culminating in a $300 million Series B financing at a $3.25 billion valuation in February 2026, backed by prominent institutional investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, [...] ## High-Level Overview Black Forest Labs is an independent AI research company focused on developing state-of-the-art foundation models for image and video generation. Founded in early 2024, the company builds the FLUX family of visual AI models that power production workloads across enterprises, developers, and creative professionals. Rather than offering image generation as a secondary feature within a larger platform, Black Forest Labs operates as a laser-focused specialist entirely dedicated to visual intelligence—a positioning that distinguishes it from competitors that are divisions of larger technology companies. [...] ## Quick Take & Future Outlook Black Forest Labs is positioned to become a central player in the next era of visual AI development. The company's $300 million Series B provides capital to execute an ambitious roadmap: unifying perception, generation, and reasoning into a multimodal intelligence system that combines vision, reasoning, and memory. This evolution from pure image generation toward broader visual understanding represents the natural next frontier.

• Announcing Black Forest Labs | Black Forest Labs

  We are a team of distinguished AI researchers and engineers with an outstanding track record in developing foundational generative AI models in academic, industrial, and open-source environments. Our innovations include creating VQGAN, Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion models for image and video generation (Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Video Diffusion, Rectified Flow Transformers), and Adversarial Diffusion Distillation for ultra-fast, real-time image synthesis. Our core belief is that widely accessible models not only foster innovation and collaboration within the research community and academia, but also increase transparency, which is essential for trust and broad adoption. Our team strives to develop the highest quality technology and to make it accessible to the broadest audience [...] Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Black Forest Labs. Deeply rooted in the generative AI research community, our mission is to develop and advance state-of-the-art generative deep learning models for media such as images and videos, and to push the boundaries of creativity, efficiency and diversity. We believe that generative AI will be a fundamental building block of all future technologies. By making our models available to a wide audience, we want to bring its benefits to everyone, educate the public and enhance trust in the safety of these models. We are determined to build the industry standard for generative media. Today, as the first step towards this goal, we release the FLUX.1 suite of models that push the frontiers of text-to-image synthesis. [...] Our core belief is that widely accessible models not only foster innovation and collaboration within the research community and academia, but also increase transparency, which is essential for trust and broad adoption. Our team strives to develop the highest quality technology and to make it accessible to the broadest audience possible.

• Welcome, Black Forest Labs! | Salesforce Ventures

  ## The Solution The Black Forest Labs leadership team. Black Forest Labs (BFL) is building the foundational infrastructure for production-grade generative images through its proprietary FLUX family of models (e.g., FLUX 1, FLUX 2, FLUX Dev, FLUX Kontext, FLUX Pro). BFL’s approach is to build architecture around what forward-thinking enterprises, creators, and developers need to bring their imagination to life. [...] ## Why We’re Backing Black Forest Labs Led by CEO Robin Rombach, Black Forest Labs’ founding team is made up of the original co-creators behind latent diffusion, adversarial distillation, and Stable Diffusion: groundbreakingresearch papers that have shaped the visual AI field. In fact, their work has influenced the core architectures of popular models, such as DALL-E and Sora, among others. At an incredible pace, they’ve translated their work into a leading research lab for visual intelligence, and we believe BFL will be the source of the next major advance in visual research. The team’s track record of innovation and respect within the industry has helped to attract and retain world-class talent, enabling BFL to build one of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

• Flux (text-to-image model) - Wikipedia

  Black Forest Labs (BFL) was founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser, former employees of Stability AI. All three founders had previously researched the artificial intelligence image generation at LMU Munich as research assistants under Björn Ommer. They published their research results on image generation in 2022, which resulted in creation of Stable Diffusion. Investors in BFL included venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Brendan Iribe, Michael Ovitz, Garry Tan, and Vladlen Koltun. The company received an initial investment of US$31 million. As of 2026, the company had 70 employees and is still considered a start-up, yet competes against much better funded Silicon Valley companies. [...] Flux is a family of text-to-image and image-to-image models developed by Black Forest Labs (BFL), based in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Black Forest Labs was founded by former employees of Stability AI. As with other text-to-image models, Flux generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts. In addition, some Flux models support editing images. ## Black Forest Labs [edit&action=edit&section=1 "Edit section: Black Forest Labs")] [...] 6. 1 2 Schwär, Hannah (15 August 2024). "Black Forest Labs: Die Schwarzwald-KI, auf die Elon Musk setzt". Capital.de "Capital (German magazine)") (in German). Retrieved 17 November 2024. 7. ↑ "High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models". Computer Vision & Learning Group. Archived from the original on 16 November 2024. Retrieved 17 November 2024. 8. 1 2 3 4 "Announcing Black Forest Labs". Black Forest Labs. 1 August 2024. Archived from the original on 17 November 2024. Retrieved 17 November 2024. 9. ↑ Steinschaden, Jakob (12 August 2024). "Black Forest Labs: 31 Mio. Dollar für Herausforderer von OpenAI und Midjourney". Trending Topics (in German). Archived from the original on 28 August 2024. Retrieved 17 November 2024.

• Black Forest Labs — Pixel Point

  Pixel Point # Black Forest Labs Frontier visual intelligence — the lab behind FLUX Watch video Black Forest Labs #### Provided services Video Production Motion Design Storyboarding #### Technology stack After Effects Figma ## About the project Black Forest Labs is the frontier AI lab behind FLUX — one of the most widely adopted image model families in the world, founded by the original creators of Stable Diffusion and integrated by companies including Adobe, Canva, and Meta. When a lab at this level ships a new model, the launch video is the first thing millions of people see.

• Country

  United States

• Instance Of

  Q6881511

• Coordinates

  Lat: 47.995027, Lon: 7.843699

• Notable Work

  Flux

• Headquarters

  Freiburg im Breisgau

• Inception Date

  8/1/2024