Black Forest Labs secures 300 million US dollars in Series B

The German-American AI startup Black Forest Labs has closed a Series B financing round of 300 million US dollars. This brings the valuation to 3.25 billion US dollars (post-money). The company develops next-generation models for visual artificial intelligence and intends to use the new funding to significantly expand its research and development activities.

From start-up to influential technology provider

Black Forest Labs was founded in 2024 with the aim of developing powerful and intuitively controllable image models. These are systems that do not react exclusively to prompt execution, but interpret and creatively implement the user's intentions. Their FLUX series models are among the most popular open image models on Hugging Face and are widely used in numerous enterprise platforms such as Fal.ai, Replicate and TogetherAI.

International technology companies such as Adobe, Canva, Meta and Microsoft are also integrating the models to enable new creative applications.

Visual intelligence as a long-term vision

While the FLUX models are already widely used, the company is working on an overarching goal: models that combine visual perception, image generation, memory functions and reasoning. The aim is to lay the foundations for genuine "visual intelligence", which would go far beyond traditional image generation.

Investors expand commitment

The round is led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP). Other investors include Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva and Figma Ventures. Existing investors such as a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital and General Catalyst are also increasing their commitment.

The new funds will flow directly into the further expansion of the research program.

Strong team of AI pioneers

The core team at Black Forest Labs includes leading developers behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion and FLUX. With locations in Freiburg and San Francisco, the company is expanding its team and is looking for additional specialists for research, development and infrastructure.

As recently as October, we speculated about a possible round and ranked Black Forest Labs.