German artificial intelligence (AI) lab Black Forest Labs announced Monday it has completed a Series B funding round, securing $300 million and achieving a post-money valuation of $3.25 billion. The investment round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP).
The company indicated that the newly raised capital will be primarily directed towards accelerating its research and development efforts. Other significant participants in the Series B round included prominent investors such as a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures.
Black Forest Labs, which specializes in developing foundational AI models for generating and editing images, has experienced rapid growth since its inception in August 2024. The firm gained considerable market attention in 2024 when its models were revealed to be powering the image generation functions within Elon Musk's Grok chatbot. This early adoption underscored the capabilities of its underlying technology in high-profile applications.
The company's AI models are currently integrated into services and products across a diverse range of industrial and creative platforms. Clients utilizing Black Forest Labs' technology include Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel, demonstrating broad adoption within the digital content and AI application sectors.
In a recent product development, Black Forest Labs unveiled Flux 2, the latest iteration of its image-generation model. According to company statements, Flux 2 offers improvements in text and image rendering quality. A notable feature of the model is its ability to reference up to ten input images, allowing for consistent style and tone maintenance during image generation. Furthermore, Flux 2 is engineered to produce high-resolution images, reaching up to 4K pixels, addressing demands for detailed visual content.
The founding team of Black Forest Labs includes Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann. These founders were previously researchers credited with contributing to the development of Stability AI's widely recognized Stable Diffusion models, bringing established expertise in generative AI to the company.
