Black Forest Labs has raised $300 million in a Series B round that values the German AI startup at $3.25 billion. The round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha’s 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 plans to use the funding to expand research and development efforts.
Founded in 2024, Black Forest Labs develops foundation models for image generation and editing. Its models gained widespread attention after being integrated into Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot and are now used by platforms including Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel. The company recently released Flux 2, which features improved text and image rendering, supports up to 10 reference inputs, and generates images at resolutions up to 4K pixels.
The funding arrives as competition in AI image generation intensifies. Google recently expanded its own image-generation offerings with Nano Banana Pro, reflecting broader demand for high-quality consumer and enterprise-grade imaging tools. Black Forest Labs’ founders — Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann — previously helped develop Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion models, positioning the company as a growing force in the next generation of visual AI systems.
