Black Forest Labs is a German generative-AI developer that builds the FLUX family of visual models. It was founded in 2024 by researchers who had previously developed latent diffusion at LMU Munich and Heidelberg University and then Stable Diffusion at Stability AI, and describes itself as a frontier research lab for visual intelligence, operating from Freiburg im Breisgau and San Francisco with a team of roughly 70 (Source: bfl.ai).
Snapshot
Valuation and funding
| Date | Value | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-12 | $3.25B post-money | $300M Series B co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha, with a16z, NVIDIA, General Catalyst and Temasek participating; total raised above $450M | (Source: sacra.com; ft.com) |
| 2024-08 | — | $31M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz | (Source: sacra.com) |
Founding and team
The founding team includes Robin Rombach (chief executive), Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz. Before founding the company the core group produced latent diffusion in university research and then Stable Diffusion at Stability AI, and left to build an organization dedicated to visual models rather than a general-purpose lab (Source: startupintros.com; bfl.ai). The company's own framing sequences its lineage as "powerful (Latent Diffusion), accessible (Stable Diffusion), and controllable (FLUX.1)" (Source: bfl.ai).
Models and business
The FLUX family spans text-to-image generation, image editing (FLUX Kontext) and, from 2026, video. The company operates a freemium model: open-weight releases alongside commercial enterprise licences and a hosted API (Source: startupintros.com). Its open-weight posture places it among the European contributors to open-weights image generation, in contrast to the closed image stacks of the large US labs.
On July 23, 2026 it launched FLUX 3 alongside FLUX-Mimic, its first models for robotics, extending from generative imagery into physical AI (Source: bloomberg.com). See AI Robotics, Embodied AI vs AGI (China's Race Redirect).
Commercially the company licenses its models to platform distributors. Sacra reports a multi-year contract with Meta signed in September 2025 worth $140 million, bringing total contract value across partners including Adobe, Canva and Snap to roughly $300 million (Source: sacra.com).
Transparency and provenance commitments
Black Forest Labs is among the signatories to the EU AI Act's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content, alongside Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Synthesia (Source: techcrunch.com). The code implements the Article 50 marking obligations that took effect on August 2, 2026. See Data Provenance, C2PA, and Watermarking, EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689).
Reception
The company's move into film drew organized objection from creative-industry unions in June 2026, when Martin Scorsese joined it as an adviser and endorsed its storyboarding tools. The Art Directors Guild condemned the partnership, and coverage framed the episode as a test of whether a director of Scorsese's standing could normalize generative tools in Hollywood (Source: nytimes.com; variety.com). See Media, Journalism & Entertainment — AI Deployment.
Relationships
- related: Embodied AI vs AGI (China's Race Redirect) — expansion of a media-generation developer into robotics models
- related: AI Robotics, Media, Journalism & Entertainment — AI Deployment, Open-Source AI / Open-Weight Models
- regulated-by: EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) — signatory to the Article 50 transparency code
- related: Meta AI — licensing customer
Confidence note: medium — funding and revenue figures rest on aggregator reporting (Sacra, startupintros) corroborated in outline by the FT; the December 2025 Series B date is given as February 2026 by one aggregator and December 2025 by two others including the lead investor's own announcement.