Black Forest Labs

Black Forest Labs was founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser, former researchers behind Stable Diffusion at Stability AI, along with other co-founders. The company is headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, in the Black Forest region from which it takes its name.

The company's primary product is FLUX, a family of text-to-image generation models offered in multiple variants, including open-weight and commercial versions. FLUX has been adopted by developers and platforms building image-generation features, and has been integrated into products from companies such as X (Twitter) for its Grok image generation feature. Black Forest Labs positions itself as a research lab focused on generative models for images and, over time, other media formats such as video.

Black Forest Labs raised a $31 million seed round in 2024, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from other investors. The company employs a small team of researchers and engineers, reflecting its focus on model research and development rather than large-scale commercial operations.