German AI startup Black Forest Labs announced a $300m Series B round on Monday, led by AMP and Salesforce, valuing the company at $3.25bn.
The Freiburg-based startup has quietly raised over $450m in just over a year, attracting big name backers like Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Creandum.
Black Forest Labs emerged from stealth in August 2024 with a suite of text-to-image models that experts said at the time set new standards in AI-powered image generation.
Last week, the startup released FLUX.2, its second generation image model. It can generate high quality, realistic images from text or multiple image prompts, and also supports image-editing and greater control over composition and style.
The startup releases some versions of its Flux model under an open source licence, enabling developers to explore the technology in a variety of use cases and iterate on the software.
Investors such as Temasek, Visionaries Club, Northzone and Air Street Capital also participated in the Series B round.
Cofounder and CEO Robin Rombach and other members of the team at Black Forest Labs are widely known for being behind the release of a breakthrough technology for image generation known as Stable Diffusion released in 2021.
Since its founding, Black Forest Labs has inked major partnerships with companies like French large language model maker Mistral, where its tech powers image generation on Le Chat, Deutsche Telekom, Adobe and Meta. It remains one of the few players in Europe building its own large language models.
“We built Black Forest Labs to advance visual intelligence at the frontier and we’re proud to be doing so from both our hometown in southern Germany and the heart of innovation in San Francisco,” said Rombach in a statement.
“Visual AI is shifting from impressive image generation to genuine understanding and the market for our products is growing rapidly as a result. This is just the beginning. We're building multimodal models that unify perception, generation, and reasoning — foundational infrastructure for how we'll shape and experience the visual world."
The startup plans to use the fresh capital to ramp up its research and development, as well as continue to grow its 50-person team across Germany and the US.
