# Black Forest Labs — Generative image and video AI models. Black Forest Labs is a generative AI lab building state-of-the-art text-to-image and video models, including the open FLUX family, from the team behind Stable Diffusion. Founded 2024 Headquarters Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany Category Foundational AI, Developer Tools, Open Source Legal name Black Forest Labs Inc. Legal domicile Delaware, United States Black Forest Labs’s legal entity is domiciled in Delaware, United States, outside Europe — which is a bit uncool. ## Highlights Notable milestones from Black Forest Labs’s journey — funding rounds, launches, and other moments worth knowing. Launch - Jul 2026 ### FLUX 3 makes BFL's world model multimodal FLUX 3 moved BFL beyond image generation into a single foundation model trained across images, video and audio, with an action-prediction interface for selected partners. The early-access launch made its first physical-AI use case explicit: FLUX-mimic, a video-action model deployed with Audi. **FLUX 3 combines image, video and audio in one world-model architecture.** [Source](https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-3) Recognition - Jun 2026 ### A 90-person frontier lab gets a seat at the G7 AI table Co-founder and CEO Robin Rombach joined President Macron, President Trump, Chancellor Merz, President von der Leyen and other G7 leaders to argue for open, responsible AI development. BFL framed itself as a 90-person Germany-and-US lab whose team had co-developed three of the five most popular open generative AI models of all time. **Rombach used the G7 forum to make the case for open visual AI as critical infrastructure.** [Source](https://bfl.ai/blog/our-co-founder-and-ceo-urges-g7-leaders-to-back-open-innovation) Partnership - Jun 2026 ### Envato makes FLUX core creative infrastructure Envato disclosed that FLUX models had generated more than 51 million images on its creative platform and now account for about a quarter of total image generation volume. The partnership gives Envato early access to new BFL releases and private endpoints, letting it put FLUX.2 into production on launch day. [Source](https://bfl.ai/blog/how-envato-built-its-creative-ai-engine-on-flux) Partnership - Jun 2026 ### FLUX.2 ships on consumer laptops through ASUS and NVIDIA Black Forest Labs made FLUX.2 \[klein\] 4B the first FLUX model to ship on consumer hardware, preloaded in ASUS's MuseTree app on next-generation ProArt RTX laptops. The on-device build targets sub-5-second generation on 8GB of VRAM without an API call or internet connection. **FLUX.2 \[klein\] running locally inside ASUS MuseTree on ProArt RTX laptops.** [Source](https://bfl.ai/blog/flux2-klein-on-device) Launch - Jan 2026 ### FLUX.2 [klein] makes image generation interactive BFL shrank FLUX.2 into fast 4B and 9B variants that unify generation and editing, run on as little as 13GB of VRAM, and can return images in under a second. The 4B model shipped with Apache 2.0 weights, pushing the open side of the FLUX line back toward consumer hardware. [Source](https://bfl.ai/blog/flux2-klein-towards-interactive-visual-intelligence) Funding - Dec 2025 ### $300M Series B at a $3.25B valuation Salesforce Ventures and a16z's Anjney Midha co-led, with NVIDIA, General Catalyst, and Temasek joining. The round took total funding past $430M and made BFL the best-capitalised open image lab in Europe — all within 18 months of launch. Round Series B Raised $300M Valuation $3.25B Led by Salesforce Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz **The December 2025 raise that valued the lab at $3.25B.** [Source](https://bfl.ai/blog/our-300m-series-b) Launch - Nov 2025 ### FLUX.2 reaches for production realism The second generation closed much of the gap with the leading closed models — handling dense prompts, legible text, and consistency across multiple images well enough to lean on for real product work. **Early samples leaned into the hard cases — legible text, crowded scenes, consistent lighting.** Launch - May 2025 ### FLUX.1 Kontext puts editing inside the model Rather than generate from scratch, Kontext edits an image from a plain text instruction — change the background, restyle a character, fix a detail — and keeps the subject recognisable across a chain of edits. **Demos showed the same subject surviving a chain of text-only edits — exactly where earlier editors fell apart.** Launch - Oct 2024 ### FLUX1.1 [pro] doubles down on speed A rebuilt flagship that generated up to six times faster than the original while sharpening detail. Tested anonymously as "blueberry", it quietly took the top spot on the Artificial Analysis image leaderboard before BFL revealed it was theirs. Partnership - Aug 2024 ### Became the image engine inside Grok Two weeks after launch, xAI wired FLUX.1 into Grok on X. Overnight it reached millions — and Grok's loose guardrails dropped it straight into the public fight over what AI image tools should refuse to make. Launch - Aug 2024 ### FLUX.1 arrives, from the Stable Diffusion team The researchers who created Stable Diffusion left Stability AI and reappeared months later with FLUX.1 — three models at once, from a fast Apache-licensed version to a closed flagship. Output quality drew instant comparisons to Midjourney and DALL·E. **The closed \[pro\] tier turned out the cleanest results of the three at launch.** [Source](https://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux) Funding - Aug 2024 ### A $31M seed to fund the launch Andreessen Horowitz led an unusually large seed for a months-old European lab, valuing it at $150M and bankrolling the compute behind the FLUX.1 release. Round Seed Raised $31M Valuation $150M Led by Andreessen Horowitz