# 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.

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