The founding team of Black Forest Labs includes Stable Diffusion researchers like Andreas Blattmann. Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images
Black Forest Labs, a German A.I. startup drawing attention from Silicon Valley players like Meta, xAI and Adobe, is on track to raise between $200 million and $300 million in a round that could value the just year-old company at $4 billion, the Financial Times first reported. It’s another sign that the A.I. investment frenzy is steadily making its way across Europe.
Specializing in A.I.-powered image generation, Black Forest Labs launched last year with an initial $31 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other early backers included Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, entertainment mogul Michael Ovitz, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Nvidia researcher Timo Aila and Apple scientist Vladlen Koltun.
Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, the startup is best known for its Flux series of image generation and editing models. Its founders—Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser and Andreas Blattman—previously helped develop Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion models, a release that marked a major turning point in text-to-image generation.
Despite being only a year old, Black Forest Labs’ technology has already been integrated by some of the tech industry’s most powerful players. Earlier this month, Meta agreed to pay $140 million to use its models, which played a role in the launch of Vibes, a new short-form video feature in the Meta AI app. Alexandr Wang, head of Meta’s superintelligence efforts, noted at the time that the company ultimately hopes to develop its own models in-house.
Elon Musk’s startup xAI has also tapped Black Forest Labs’ tech to power image generation in its Grok chatbot. Adobe uses the company’s models to enhance its Firefly app, while Paris-based Mistral incorporates its tools into its A.I. assistant “Le Chat.”
Mistral, like Black Forest Labs, is among the rare European startups building in-house models. Central to Europe’s A.I. sovereignty goals ambitions in the field, Mistral doubled its valuation in September to $13.7 billion after raising $2 billion, the largest-ever venture round for a European A.I. company, according to Crunchbase.
Other notable players include London’s Celonis, Wayve and Isomorphic Labs, as well as Germany’s Helsing, a defense-focused startup valued at €12 billion ($14 billion) earlier this year.
These figures are still far behind U.S. rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, valued at $300 billion and $183 billion respectively. But investor interest in European A.I. is clearly accelerating. Globally, funding for A.I. companies hit $100 billion last year—an 80 percent jump from the year prior—and startups have already raised $118 billion through August of this year, Crunchbase data shows.
