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

German Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Black Forest Laboratories It said Monday it had 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 Laboratories, which manufactures Basic AI models for image generation and editinghas risen to fame quickly since its launch in August 2024. The company has been in the news last year After it was revealed that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot was using the German company’s templates to create images, its templates are used by a large number 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.