Black Forest Labs

Black Forest Labs Inc.operates as a software company. The Company develops cutting-edge generative deep-learning models designed to offer image and video generation while prioritizing widespread accessibility and transparency. Flux (also known as FLUX.1 and FLUX.2) is a text-to-image model developed by Black Forest Labs (BFL), based in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

Überblick

Unternehmenstyp: Software-Unternehmen / KI-Labor
Gründung: 2024
Hauptsitz: Freiburg im Breisgau, Deutschland
Weitere Standorte: Wilmington, Delaware (USA) und San Francisco
Geschäftstätigkeit: Entwicklung fortschrittlicher generativer Deep-Learning-Modelle für Bilder und Videos mit Fokus auf breite Zugänglichkeit und Transparenz
Website: blackforestlabs.ai
Bewertung: $3,25 Milliarden Post-Money-Bewertung (Dezember 2025)
Gesamtfinanzierung: $450 Millionen über 2 Finanzierungsrunden

Produkte und Services

Black Forest Labs ist bekannt für seine FLUX-Modellfamilie, die verschiedene Text-zu-Bild-Generierungsmodelle umfasst:

FLUX.1-Modelle

FLUX.1 [pro]: The best of FLUX.1, offering state-of-the-art performance image generation with top of the line prompt following, visual quality, image detail and output diversity.
FLUX.1 [dev]: FLUX.1 [dev] is an open-weight, guidance-distilled model for non-commercial applications.
FLUX.1 [schnell]: tailored for local development and personal use, available under an Apache 2.0 license

Neueste Entwicklungen

FLUX.1 Kontext: a suite of models that enable in-context image generation and editing, allowing users to prompt with both text and images
FLUX.2: launched just last week and offers impressive precision, efficiency, control and extreme realism at a fraction of the cost

Plattformen und Verfügbarkeit

FLUX.1 [pro] is also available via Replicate and fal.ai. Our open models are the most popular image models on Hugging Face, and our enterprise models are among the most widely-adopted on platforms like Fal.ai, Replicate, and TogetherAI.

Geschichte und Entwicklung

Gründungsgeschichte

Black Forest Labs (BFL) was founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser, former employees of Stability AI. All three founders had previously researched the artificial intelligence image generation at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as research assistants under Björn Ommer.

They published their research results on image generation in 2022, which resulted in creation of Stable Diffusion. 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.

Markteinführung

The company emerged from stealth in August 2024, with a suite of text-to-image models that experts at the time said set new standards in AI-powered image generation. Black Forest Labs, which makes foundation AI models for generating and editing images, has risen to fame quickly since its launch in August 2024.

Wichtige Meilensteine

August 2024: Flux was integrated into the Grok chatbot developed by xAI and made available as part of premium feature on X (formerly Twitter)
November 2024: Mistral AI announced that its Le Chat chatbot had integrated Flux Pro as its image generation model
Januar 2025: BFL announced a partnership with Nvidia for inclusion of Flux models as foundation models for Nvidia’s Blackwell microarchitecture

Team und Führung

Gründer-Team

Robin Rombach (CEO): Lead researcher behind Stable Diffusion und studied physics at Heidelberg University, before pursuing a PhD in computer science
Andreas Blattmann: Key contributor to Latent Diffusion models
Patrick Esser: who would go on to become a cofounder of Black Forest Labs und Mitschöpfer der Stable Diffusion-Modelle
Dominik Lorenz: Former Stability AI engineer

The three co-founders, Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser, are researchers at heart, with a shared, longstanding passion for the intersection of visual media and AI that spans their time in academia.

Team-Erweiterung

Five of the company’s ten cofounders came from Stability: Andreas Blattmann, Jonas Julius Müller, Sumith Kulal, Tim Dockhorn and Axel Sauer.

Investoren und Eigentümer

Seed-Finanzierung (August 2024)

We are excited to announce the successful closing of our Series Seed funding round of $31 million.

Lead-Investor: Andreessen Horowitz

Weitere Investoren: Brendan Iribe, Michael Ovitz, Garry Tan, Timo Aila, and Vladlen Koltun sowie General Catalyst and MätchVC

Series B-Finanzierung (Dezember 2025)

We’re excited to announce our Series B of $300M at a $3.25B post-money valuation.

Co-Lead-Investoren: Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP)

Weitere Investoren: a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva and Figma Ventures

Konkurrenz

Hauptkonkurrenten laut Marktanalyse:

Runway AI, Midjourney, and Stability AI are competitors of Black Forest Labs
Its top competitors include companies like Openlayer, Lattice Flow and TurinTech
Competitors of Black Forest Labs include Replicate and 7 more

Marktpositionierung: According to Artificial Analysis, Black Forest Lab’s FLUX.1 models surpass Midjourney’s and OpenAI’s AI image generators in terms of quality, at least as ranked by users in their image arena.