German startup Black Forest Labs has signed a multi-year contract with Meta, for the social media firm to use the startup’s AI image generation tools, reports say.
Meta will commit $35m to Black Forest Labs in the first year, and then $105m in the second year, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
A spokesperson for Black Forest Labs declined to comment on “current or potential partnerships.” Sifted has reached out to Meta for comment.
Black Forest Labs was founded by a group of computer scientists from London startup Stability AI. The secretive startup, based near the Black Forest in Freiburg, burst onto the AI scene in August last year with a suite of text-to-image models that experts said surpassed US competitors like OpenAI and Midjourney.
The same month, Black Forest Labs raised a hefty $31m seed round from prolific US VCs General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, plus Silicon Valley stalwart Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.
Meta has sought to shore up its position in AI. In August, the social media giant struck a partnership with Midjourney, another AI image generator.
Black Forest Labs previously had a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI, developing an AI-image generation tool for its chatbot Grok. A source close to Black Forest Labs told Sifted in April that the partnership had ended.
The startup was generating $96.3m in annual recurring revenue (ARR) as of August, Bloomberg reported.
