Black Forest Labs funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Black Forest Labs builds FLUX, a family of AI models that generate and edit images from text prompts. Developers pay to call the models through an API, large platforms license them to run inside their own products, and some versions are released as open weights that anyone can download. The company is based in Freiburg, in Germany's Black Forest region, with a second office in San Francisco.

Black Forest Labs has raised about $450 million across three rounds since it launched in August 2024, all of it equity. Its latest, a Series B co-led by Salesforce Ventures and AMP in December 2025, valued the company at $3.25 billion.

The founders are the researchers who created Stable Diffusion, and their investor list mixes Silicon Valley venture firms with the companies that sell their models to end users: Canva, Figma, Adobe, and Shutterstock all joined the cap table. Let's dive into Black Forest Labs' funding history.

Black Forest Labs came out of stealth with money already in the bank and a model ready to ship. It raised its Series A within months and kept the round quiet for more than a year, then announced it alongside the Series B.

Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser met as researchers in Germany, where they co-wrote the latent diffusion paper that became Stable Diffusion. They then worked at Stability AI, the London startup that released it, and left in 2024 as that company ran into money and leadership problems.

They announced Black Forest Labs on August 1, 2024, together with the seed round and the first FLUX.1 models. Andreessen Horowitz led the seed. The angel list leaned toward people who had built hardware and media businesses: Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz, and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, along with Nvidia research director Timo Aila.

FLUX.1 shipped in three tiers that still shape the business. The fastest version was free under an Apache license, a mid-tier version was open for non-commercial use, and the best one was available only through the paid API.

The company did not publish a valuation. TechCrunch, citing PitchBook data, put the post-money figure at about $150 million.

The seed lasted only a few months. In August 2024, FLUX.1 became the image generator inside Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk's xAI, and the deal put an unknown German lab in front of millions of users overnight.

By September, TechCrunch reported the company was raising at a $1 billion valuation. In November, Bloomberg reported talks for up to $200 million led again by Andreessen Horowitz. Black Forest Labs never confirmed either report, and it stayed silent when the round closed.

The company finally named the Series A in its December 2025 release, describing it as "previously unannounced." Andreessen Horowitz led, with Nvidia, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird, BroadLight Capital, and General Catalyst. Handelsblatt reported that it raised more than $100 million at more than $1 billion. The exact amount and date are still undisclosed.

In September 2025, Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported that Black Forest Labs was in early talks to raise at a valuation of up to $4 billion. The price came down during negotiations, and the round closed on December 1 at $3.25 billion, with Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha's fund AMP as co-leads.

Handelsblatt described the round as heavily oversubscribed. Most of the seed and Series A investors came back, and more than a dozen new funds joined, from Singapore's Temasek to Bain Capital Ventures and Lux Capital. The largest group of newcomers was strategic: design and media platforms that already pay to run FLUX.

A filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, made in June 2026, gives a more precise picture. It shows that $307.6 million had been sold to 36 investors by then, out of an offering of $343.3 million, with the first sale dated November 21, 2025. That leaves room for about $36 million more under the same round. Black Forest Labs has not announced any of it.

Black Forest Labs' valuation rose more than twentyfold in about 16 months. The company has confirmed only its latest price, so the earlier steps rely on press reports.

The Series A priced the company at roughly seven times the seed, a jump driven by the Grok deal and FLUX.1's quick climb on public image-model leaderboards. The Series B then roughly tripled that price in about a year. Pace like this has become common for AI labs, as the data on how fast startups now reach unicorn status shows.

The gap between the price sought in September and the closing price is the clearest sign of how investors weighed the business. The Financial Times reported that Black Forest Labs had reached about $96 million in annual recurring revenue by August 2025, one year after launch. At $3.25 billion, the Series B valued the company at about 34 times that run rate.

A useful contrast is Midjourney's founder-owned model, the best-known rival in AI images. Midjourney has never taken outside money and funds itself from subscriptions, so it has no comparable valuation. Black Forest Labs chose the opposite route, selling stakes to its own customers and to the venture firms that back other AI labs.

Black Forest Labs' investors fall into three groups: the venture firms that backed the founders from the start, the growth investors that led the Series B, and the platforms and suppliers whose businesses depend on FLUX working well.

Andreessen Horowitz led both the seed and the Series A and returned in the Series B. The firm made the first bet before FLUX had any paying customers, based largely on the founders' track record with Stable Diffusion.

General Catalyst is the only other firm to have invested at every stage. For Black Forest Labs, the main value of these early backers was speed: they could commit before launch and keep funding the company through the quiet Series A.

Salesforce Ventures and AMP co-led the Series B. Salesforce's venture arm has been one of the most active backers of AI model companies, and its parent sells marketing and commerce software where generated product images and ads are a natural fit.

AMP is the fund of Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner. The SEC filing lists Midha as a director alongside the three founders, which makes him the only outside investor named on the board.

Nvidia invested in the Series A and returned for the Series B, and its research director Timo Aila was a seed angel. The relationship runs both ways. Black Forest Labs trains on Nvidia GPUs, and the two companies have worked together to optimize FLUX models for Nvidia's data center and consumer chips.

That makes Nvidia both an investor and a supplier, a position it holds across much of the AI industry. Every dollar Black Forest Labs spends on training compute flows back toward Nvidia's data center business in one form or another.

The Series B also brought in investors that usually write larger checks at later stages. Temasek, Singapore's state investment company, joined alongside Bain Capital Ventures, StepStone, Lux Capital, Headline, and Samsung Next.

Funds of this kind tend to keep investing as a company grows. That gives Black Forest Labs a set of backers able to fund a larger Series C without needing a new lead from outside the cap table.

The Series B brought in Canva, Figma Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Shutterstock, and Deutsche Telekom's venture arm T.Capital. Each of them either runs FLUX inside its products or sells content that competes with generated images.

Canva and Figma use FLUX models in their design tools, and Adobe added a FLUX model to Photoshop's Generative Fill in 2025. Deutsche Telekom has used a custom FLUX model for its marketing since early 2025. For these companies, a stake is a way to stay close to a model supplier that also sells to their competitors. For Black Forest Labs, it ties some of its largest customers to its success. Canva itself is still private, and Canva's founder-heavy ownership puts its co-founders among its largest shareholders.

European venture firms make up a large part of the cap table. Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird, Visionaries Club, Cherry Ventures, and LEA Partners all invested, which gives the Freiburg company a local base even as most of its revenue comes from US platforms.

The Series B angels include former Formula 1 champion Nico Rosberg, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, and ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski. Staniszewski runs another European AI lab that sells models to developers, and ElevenLabs' own funding history follows a similar path from open research to a multibillion-dollar valuation.

Black Forest Labs said the Series B would pay for research and development, hiring, and infrastructure. It has not published a budget, but its job postings, product launches, and headcount show where most of the capital is going.

Training image and video models is the largest cost. Black Forest Labs runs its own large GPU training clusters, and the company has said little about the size of its compute contracts. Its newest model, FLUX 3, adds video, audio, and robot motion to still images, and the company has said video prediction uses most of its training compute.

Video is far more expensive to train and to serve than still images. That shift is one reason the Series B was larger than both earlier rounds combined, and it puts Black Forest Labs in more direct competition with video labs such as Runway and Luma, whose own Luma AI funding rounds are built around the same compute race.

Black Forest Labs is small for a company at its valuation. Rombach put the team at about 90 people across Germany and the United States in June 2026, up from about 40 in 2025.

Most of that team works on research. Rombach has said he wants a company that is "not too dependent on capital markets," and a small team keeps the burn far below that of labs with thousands of employees.

The money also supports the commercial side, which is what turns research into revenue. Black Forest Labs makes money in two roughly equal ways, according to Fortune: usage-based fees from developers calling its API, and enterprise licenses from companies that run FLUX in their own products.

The largest license on record is with Meta. Bloomberg reported in September 2025 that Meta agreed to pay about $140 million over two years to use FLUX models. Other licensees include Microsoft, which offers FLUX on its Azure AI Foundry platform, along with Snap, Picsart, and the investors named above. Meta's AI push is set by Zuckerberg's controlling stake, and a single decision there could change Black Forest Labs' revenue mix.

The open-weight releases feed the paid business. Blattmann has called open source "a very good way of extending a funnel": developers try the free models, then pay for the faster and higher-quality versions through the API.

Black Forest Labs' growth push is moving beyond still images. FLUX 3, released in July 2026, generates images, video clips of up to 20 seconds with synced audio, and robot actions from a single model. In September 2026 the company followed it with FLUX 3 Action, an open-weights robotics model built with Nvidia and Hugging Face, and Audi is testing a version of it on a production line. The company has also added video upscaling and virtual try-on tools for retailers, and named filmmaker Martin Scorsese as an advisor in June 2026.

The company has not announced a Series C or IPO plans, and no new valuation has been reported in 2026. Customer concentration is the clearest risk. Grok moved much of its image generation to xAI's own Aurora model in December 2024, a reminder that the largest buyers can build in-house, and the funding behind xAI dwarfs anything Black Forest Labs has raised. WIRED reported in April 2026 that xAI approached Black Forest Labs about licensing its models again and was turned down.

Competition is the other pressure. Google, OpenAI, and Midjourney all sell image models, and API prices across the market keep falling. The Series B is paying for the move into video and robotics, and the next round will likely depend on whether FLUX 3 turns into licenses large enough to reduce the company's dependence on a few big platforms.

Black Forest Labs has raised about $450 million, according to the company. That covers three equity rounds: a $31 million seed in August 2024, a Series A of undisclosed size in late 2024, and a $300 million Series B in December 2025. The company has not reported any debt.

Black Forest Labs' lead investors are Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Ventures, and AMP. Other backers include General Catalyst, Nvidia, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird, BroadLight Capital, Canva, Figma Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Shutterstock, Deutsche Telekom's T.Capital, and angels such as Garry Tan, Michael Ovitz, and Clem Delangue.

Black Forest Labs was valued at $3.25 billion post-money in its December 2025 Series B. That is up from a reported valuation of more than $1 billion at the Series A in late 2024 and about $150 million at the 2024 seed. The company has not disclosed a valuation since.

No. Black Forest Labs is private and has not filed for an IPO. Its shares are not traded on any stock exchange.

Black Forest Labs is owned by its founders, employees, and investors. Co-founder Robin Rombach is CEO, and he, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser sit on the board with AMP's Anjney Midha. The largest outside holder is likely Andreessen Horowitz, which led the first two rounds, though exact stakes are not public.