Black Forest Labs raises $300 million at a valuation of $3.25 billion

German artificial intelligence lab Black Forest Labs said Monday 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 will use the funds for research and development.

Black Forest Labs, which makes basic AI models for image creation and editing, has risen rapidly in popularity 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 create images, and its models are used by a slew of companies, such as Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO and Vercel.

The startup recently unveiled the latest version of its image creation model, Flux 2, which it says features better display of text and images, and uses up to 10 images as a reference to maintain style and tone while creating images. The model can create images with a resolution of up to 4K pixels.

Black Forest Labs co-founders Robin Rumbach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann were previously researchers who helped create Stable AI’s Stable Diffusion models.