German AI lab Black Forest Labs announced on Monday that it has raised three hundred million dollars in a Series B funding round. This investment values the company at three point two five billion dollars.
The funding round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha of AMP. It also saw participation from a wide range of investors including a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures. The startup stated it will use the new capital to advance its research and development efforts.
Black Forest Labs creates foundation AI models for generating and editing images. The company has risen to prominence rapidly since its launch in August of 2024. It gained significant attention last year when it was revealed that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot was using the German company’s models for image generation. Its models are now employed by a number of other companies, including Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel.
The startup recently unveiled the latest version of its image-generation model, called Flux 2. The company says this model features improved text and image rendering capabilities. It can use up to ten reference images to maintain a consistent style and tone when generating new images. The Flux 2 model is capable of generating images at resolutions as high as 4K pixels.
The co-founders of Black Forest Labs are Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann. All three were formerly researchers who contributed to the creation of Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion models.