Black Forest Labs

About Black Forest Labs

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Black Forest Labs

All products by Black Forest Labs reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

Flux by Black Forest LabsAI Image Generation

State-of-the-art image generation and editing models, served via API, playground, and open weights

Free8.0/10

Competitive Landscape

Who Black Forest Labs competes with, and how they differ.

Stability AI7.7/10

Runs the same open-plus-closed-weight diffusion image model playbook (Stable Diffusion) that BFL's own founders left in 2024 to build FLUX; FLUX has since overtaken Stable Diffusion as the most-used open-weight image model on Hugging Face.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Midjourney5.5/10

Sells directly to consumers through a closed Discord/web subscription with no public API, whereas Black Forest Labs licenses FLUX as an API and to enterprises (Meta, Adobe) and ships open-weight variants.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Ideogram7.9/10

A smaller venture-backed text-to-image startup competing for the same enterprise licensing and API customers, differentiated mainly by stronger in-model typography and text rendering.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Google DeepMind (Imagen)7.8/10

Imagen is bundled into Google's own products (Vertex AI, Gemini) rather than sold as a standalone licensed model, competing with BFL's model-as-a-service and open-weight distribution strategy from inside a much larger parent.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Bria AI7.9/10

Targets enterprise buyers with image models trained exclusively on commercially-licensed, copyright-safe data, competing directly with BFL for the same brand and platform licensing deals BFL has landed with Adobe and Meta.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Black Forest Labs's history, with sources.

1. Jul 23, 2026Launch

   Launches FLUX 3, a multimodal model for images, video and audio

   Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3, jointly trained across modalities to generate images and up to 20-second video clips with synchronized audio from a single prompt, and unveiled FLUX-mimic for robotic manipulation with Swiss firm Mimic Robotics.

   blackforestlabs.ai
2. Dec 1, 2025Funding

   Series B — $300M co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP) at $3.25B valuation

   Black Forest Labs raised $300M (SEC Form D shows $307.6M sold) with participation from a16z, Nvidia, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures and others, roughly tripling its prior valuation.

   techcrunch.com
3. Sep 9, 2025Partnership

   Signs multi-year AI image licensing deal with Meta worth over $140M

   Meta agreed to license Black Forest Labs' image-generation technology across its apps in a multi-year contract reported at $35M in year one and $105M in year two.

   ainvest.com
4. May 29, 2025Launch

   Launches FLUX.1 Kontext, a unified image generation and editing model

   FLUX.1 Kontext combined text-to-image generation and in-context, text-guided local editing in a single flow-matching architecture, released as closed (Pro/Max) and open-weight variants.

   blackforestlabs.ai
5. November 2024Funding

   Closes a Series A round (amount undisclosed) led by Andreessen Horowitz

   Black Forest Labs closed a Series A with a16z, Creandum and Earlybird Venture Capital roughly three months after its seed; later coverage of the December 2025 raise confirmed this earlier round had not been publicly disclosed at the time.

   nordic9.com
6. Aug 1, 2024Founded

   Launches with FLUX.1 model suite and $31M seed funding led by a16z

   Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser -- researchers behind Stable Diffusion at Stability AI -- launched Black Forest Labs from Freiburg, Germany with the FLUX.1 open-weight image model family and a $31M Andreessen Horowitz-led seed round.

   venturebeat.com
7. August 2024Partnership

   FLUX.1 integrated into xAI's Grok chatbot for image generation

   xAI announced it was using Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 model to power image generation in Grok 2, the partnership that first put the young startup on the map (xAI later replaced it with its own in-house model, Aurora, in early 2025).

   handelsblatt.com