Black Forest Labs
European frontier AI lab behind the FLUX image generation models
AI
📍 Freiburg, Germany
Founded 2024
Current Valuation
$3.3B
as of 2025-Q4
UNICORN
Black Forest Labs is the German AI research lab founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach and the original Stable Diffusion authors. Its FLUX image-generation models have rapidly become the open-weights standard, embedded across Grok, X, and hundreds of consumer apps. The company raised $300M in a Series B at a $3.25 billion post-money valuation in December 2025, led by Salesforce Ventures, and has emerged as one of Europe's most credible AI sovereignty plays alongside Mistral.
Company Profile
Growth
Hypergrowth — sub-2-year-old lab
Last Round
Series B — $300M (Dec 2025) · Lead: Salesforce Ventures
Founders & Key People
Robin RombachAndreas BlattmannPatrick Esser
Investors
Salesforce Ventures · Andreessen Horowitz · General Catalyst · Brendan Iribe · MätchVC
Products
- FLUX.1 (image generation)
- FLUX Pro / Dev / Schnell
- FLUX Video
- API for developers
- Open-weights releases
Competitors
Stability AI · Midjourney · OpenAI (DALL-E / Sora) · Ideogram · Runway
AIGenerative AIImage GenerationOpen WeightsEurope
Private-company numbers are not real-time. Reflects publicly disclosed valuations from press releases, news reports, and tender offers as of 2025-Q4. Refreshed quarterly.