German AI lab Black Forest Labs said on 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), and saw 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 would use the funds for research and development.
Black Forest Labs, which makes foundation AI models for generating and editing images, has risen to fame quickly since its launch in August 2024. The company was in the news last year after it was revealed that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot was using the German company’s models to generate images, and its models are being used by a slew of companies, like Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel.
The startup recently revealed the latest version of its image-generation model, Flux 2, which it says features better text and image rendering, and uses up to 10 images as a reference to maintain the style and tone while generating images. The model can generate images at resolutions up to 4K pixels.
Black Forest Labs’ co-founders, Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann, were formerly researchers who helped create Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion models.
