Black Forest Labs raises $300M to power frontier visual intelligence
Backing the inventors of modern visual AI.
From the Black Forest to the world
To the AI community, the names Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser sound very familiar. In the summer of 2022, their work on Latent Diffusion and Stable Diffusion bent the arc of visual AI by ushering photorealistic image generation onto the internet. The world went nuts, hundreds of thousands of developers built with the models, and Twitter feeds could speak (or show) nothing else. Indeed, this proceeded the low key research preview of ChatGPT, which celebrated its third birthday only yesterday.
So for the trio that ignited a revolution in generative media, founding Black Forest Labs (BFL) was the natural next step. And their focus was to translate research leadership into a category‑leading visual intelligence company built for the next decade of multimodal computing.
Today, I’m excited to unveil Air Street’s investment in Black Forest Labs as it announces a landmark funding milestone: a $300M Series B, following a previously unannounced Series A. Together, these rounds represent a big step in scaling the company’s momentum, with Black Forest Labs now capitalised with half a billion dollars and trusted by leading Fortune 500 enterprises.
From breakthroughs to exceptional execution
In under 14 months, Black Forest Labs has delivered one of the most impressive execution runs we have seen in generative AI. The company has gone from zero revenue to significant scale with Fortune 500 adoption, deep enterprise integrations, and use cases ranging from e-commerce to robotics simulation. More than 400 million downloads of their open-source FLUX models make them the most widely deployed visual-generation systems in the world. FLUX has become shorthand for quality, controllability, and reliability.
The company exhibits a set of attributes that are very rare to find and are the result of sustained, disciplined ingenuity and velocity across research, product, and go‑to‑market:
Frontier AI, open by default. Black Forest Labs defined what open frontier visual AI should look like: high‑quality, open base models with transparent research lineage and enterprise‑grade deployment options that meet the standards of global companies.
A new standard for controllable image editing. FLUX.1 Kontext and FLUX.2 transformed image generation from a probabilistic slot machine into a precise creative instrument, effectively creating a new standard for professional image editing workflows.
Compounding enterprise traction. From social platforms to global retailers, Black Forest Labs systems are already embedded in high‑value, high‑volume production workflows that demand reliability, governance, and predictable performance.
A world‑class team scaling with purpose. In under a year, the team has grown from 15 to more than 40 researchers, engineers, and operators from NVIDIA, Meta, Databricks, Google, Spotify, AWS and more, forming one of the most concentrated talent clusters in visual AI.
An enormous market. It would not be a stretch to say that billions of images are uploaded to the internet every day. And with visual AI progressing at such a pace, a large proportion of these and new content will switch to being generative from the outset.
Watch co-founder Andreas Blattmann’s talk at our 10th annual Research and Applied AI Summit in London, 13 June 2025:
The road ahead: multimodal intelligence and beyond
The roadmap reflects the Black Forest Labs’ intent to define - not simply participate in - the next frontier of visual AI. FLUX.2 launched just last week and offers impressive precision, efficiency, control and extreme realism at a fraction of the cost of systems like Google’s Nano Banana Pro. Try it on the playground!
Next up will be more powerful multimodal models that offer market-leading infrastructure to underpin how billions of people and systems create, reason, simulate, and communicate.
This shift is already visible in early customer deployments: models are moving from generating images to supporting full creative workflows, interactive video, and multimodal understanding. As the boundary between perception and generation collapses, the winners will be the companies that combine frontier research with the reliability and depth required by the world’s largest enterprises.
Black Forest Labs is that company.
Into the New
Black Forest Labs is is building the visual foundation of the next decade of AI - open, controllable, multimodal, and trusted in the most demanding settings. We’re proud to be working with Robin, Andreas, Patrick, and the entire team as they continue to define what visual intelligence can be.
🌲 Into the New 🌲
