New Funding Round Boosts the German AI Lab’s Momentum
German AI startup Black Forest Labs announced on Monday that it has raised $300 million in a Series B round, bringing the company’s valuation to $3.25 billion. The raise marks another rapid milestone for the firm, which launched in August 2024 and has since become a prominent developer of foundation image-generation models.
Major Investors Join the Round
The round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP), with participation from 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 said the funds will go toward research and development.
Models Widely Adopted Across the Tech Industry
The company gained significant attention last year after it became known that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot was using its models to generate images. Its technology has been adopted by companies including Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO and Vercel. Black Forest Labs develops foundation AI models designed for image generation and editing.
Latest Model Release Expands Capabilities
The firm recently unveiled Flux 2, its newest image-generation model. The update improves text and image rendering, and can use up to 10 reference images to maintain style and tone. Flux 2 can also generate images at resolutions up to 4K.
Founders Bring Deep Research Background
Black Forest Labs was founded by Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser and Andreas Blattmann, former researchers who contributed to the creation of Stable Diffusion models at Stability AI.
Featured image credits: Black Forest Labs
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