How Black Forest Labs is Laying the Foundations for Visual Intelligence

Black Forest Labs, building state-of-the-art technology that advances how the world is seen and understood, led by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Sumith Kulal, Axel Sauer, Patrick Esser, and Tim Dockhorn, has announced Series B funding of $300M at a $3.25B post-money valuation from a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, and General Catalyst, and welcoming Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP), as co-leads, alongside Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva and Figma Ventures.

Black Forest Labs was founded last year with a mission to build frontier-level pixel models, systems capable of creating what cameras cannot capture. The focus is on models that understand intent rather than simply executing prompts, enabling tools that turn imagination into reality for global enterprises and independent artists alike.

Millions of users are already creating with the FLUX model family. The open-source variants rank among the most popular image models on Hugging Face, while the enterprise versions are widely deployed on platforms such as Fal.ai, Replicate, and TogetherAI. Leading partners, including Adobe, Canva, Meta, and Microsoft, are integrating these models to power next-generation creative experiences. 

These are still the early days. The next phase points toward models that unify visual perception, generation, memory, and reasoning, forming the foundations of true visual intelligence. A compact team, including pioneers behind latent diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX, continues to push the frontier. With hubs in Freiburg and San Francisco, the organisation is expanding its team to help build the future of visual intelligence.