German artificial intelligence firm Black Forest Labs announced on Monday that it has successfully raised $300 million in a Series B funding round, propelling its valuation to an impressive $3.25 billion.
The funding was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha of AMP, with additional investment from notable entities such as a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures.
This capital injection is earmarked for advancing research and development efforts. Since its inception in August 2024, Black Forest Labs has quickly gained recognition for its foundational AI models that specialize in image generation and editing. Last year, the startup gained media attention when it was revealed that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot employed their models for image creation. Leading companies like Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel have since integrated these advanced capabilities into their offerings.
Black Forest Labs recently launched its latest image generation model, Flux 2, which boasts improved text and image rendering functions. This innovation allows the model to reference up to ten images simultaneously, ensuring consistency in style and tone throughout the generated outputs, with capabilities of producing images up to 4K resolution.
The company was co-founded by Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann, who were instrumental in developing the Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion models, further solidifying their expertise in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
