German AI research institute Black Forest Labs announced Monday that it has raised $300 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $3.25 billion.
The round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP), with participation from 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 said it will use the funds for research and development.
Black Forest Labs, which creates foundational AI models for image generation and editing, has rapidly risen to fame since its founding in August 2024. The company made headlines last year when it was revealed that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot was using the German company’s model to generate images. Its model is used by numerous companies, including Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, Eleven Labs, VSCO, and Vercel.
The company recently announced Flux 2, the latest version of its image generation model. The company says it has improved text and image rendering, using up to 10 images as references to maintain style and tone while generating images. This model can produce images with up to 4K pixel resolution.
Black Forest Labs co-founders Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann were previously researchers who helped create Stability AI’s stable diffusion model.
