Black Forest Labs
Open-source AI image generation models powering tools like Grok and Adobe.
- Founded
- 2024
- Headquarters
- Freiburg, Germany
- Latest Round
- Series B
- Est. Valuation
- ~$3,250M
Investment Thesis
Black Forest Labs builds the FLUX family of text-to-image foundation models. Founded by the researchers behind Stable Diffusion, their models are used by Adobe, Grok, Picsart, ElevenLabs, and VSCO.
Germany's most valuable AI company at $3.25B valuation. Champions open-source while offering commercial API access.
Creating high-quality AI-generated images requires frontier research expertise that very few teams possess, and closed models limit how creators and enterprises can customize and deploy.
The FLUX family of open-source and commercial image generation models that power 9 of the 10 most-downloaded models on the planet, with 400M+ total downloads and an API for enterprise use.
AI-generated images are transforming film, design, advertising, and research — demand is exploding and open-source models are winning the distribution war just as they did with Linux and Postgres.
Germany's most valuable AI company at $3.25B valuation, powering Adobe, Grok, Picsart, ElevenLabs, and VSCO with $400M raised in under 18 months from founding.
Robin Rombach (CEO), Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann — the researchers who literally invented the latent diffusion architecture behind Stable Diffusion at LMU Munich and Heidelberg University.