Black Forest Labs

Black Forest Labs was founded in Freiburg, Germany, in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann — the researchers who created Stable Diffusion at Stability AI — together with co-founder Dominik Lorenz. The company builds the FLUX family of models, now among the world's most widely used image and video generation tools for developers, enterprises, and creative professionals, available both as a production-ready cloud API and as open weights for self-hosting and enterprise customization. The product serves two very different audiences: indie developers integrating FLUX through pay-as-you-go API access, and large enterprise customers — including Canva and Figma, both of which are also investors — that require vertical fine-tuning, data sovereignty guarantees, and dedicated support through Forward Deployed Engineers. The infrastructure already powers billions of image generations per year. The fundraising trajectory has been extraordinarily fast: a $31M seed round in August 2024 led by a16z, followed in December 2025 by a $300M Series B that pushed the valuation to $3.25 billion, co-led by Salesforce Ventures and AMP (Anjney Midha), with participation from a16z, NVIDIA, General Catalyst, Temasek, Northzone, Creandum, and others. Total funding now exceeds $450M. BFL's story is a textbook case of 'the original creators come back to do it better': a team that left an established AI lab to found their own company on the same technical ground, becoming one of Europe's most highly valued AI companies in under two years, with operations spanning both Germany and San Francisco.