FRANKFURT: Black Forest Labs, the creator of the popular FLUX image-generation models, said on Tuesday it raised $300 million in a Series B funding round led by AMP and Salesforce Ventures, vaulting the young company to a post-money valuation of $3.25 billion.
The funding underscores fierce investor appetite for generative artificial intelligence firms that combine cutting-edge research with commercial deployment, even as the sector faces heightened scrutiny over costs and content.
The latest round brings the total capital raised by the Germany and U.S.-based company to over $450 million. It follows a previously unannounced Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with backing from Nvidia, General Catalyst, and others.
Founded in 2024 by researchers who helped pioneer the latent diffusion technology behind models like Stable Diffusion, Black Forest Labs has quickly become a leading force in visual AI. Its FLUX models are among the most downloaded text-to-image systems on the Hugging Face platform, with tens of millions of downloads, and are used by more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies.
“We built Black Forest Labs to advance visual intelligence at the frontier,” said Chief Executive Robin Rombach. “Visual AI is shifting from impressive image generation to genuine understanding… We’re building multimodal models that unify perception, generation, and reasoning.”
The company has pursued a dual strategy of releasing open-source research models while securing large-scale enterprise deals. Partners including Adobe, Canva, Deutsche Telekom, and Meta have integrated FLUX into their creative and business workflows.
“Black Forest Labs is building visual AI that meets the expectations of enterprise teams: dependable models, clear integration paths and an open approach,” said Nowi Kallen of Salesforce Ventures, highlighting the firm’s “responsible development and practical deployment.”
The new capital will accelerate research and development on the FLUX model family, hiring, and infrastructure expansion. The company recently released its FLUX.2 model.
“Black Forest Labs represents the rare combination of frontier research and disciplined execution,” said Anjney Midha of AMP. “The team has shown that a small group of world-class scientists… can meaningfully advance visual intelligence.”
The Series B round included a wide array of new investors such as Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, and corporate venture arms of Adobe, Deutsche Telekom, and Samsung. Angel investors included former Formula 1 champion Nico Rosberg and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue.
The investment signals confidence that independent AI labs can compete at the industry’s forefront alongside tech giants, as demand for high-performance visual intelligence systems grows rapidly across creative and corporate sectors.