German AI startup Black Forest Labs has announced a $300 million Series B funding round, valuing the company at $3.25 billion. The round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha of AMP, with additional participation from a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures. The company plans to use the funds to advance research and development, particularly in expanding its foundation AI models for image generation and editing. Since launching in August 2024, Black Forest Labs has gained rapid recognition in the AI community. It rose to prominence after it was revealed that Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot leveraged its models to generate images, and its technology is now integrated by a growing number of major companies, including Adobe, fal.ai, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel. The startup recently unveiled the latest version of its flagship image-generation model, Flux 2. According to Black Forest Labs, the new model delivers improved text and image rendering, supports up to 10 reference images to preserve style and tone, and can generate high-resolution images up to 4K. This advancement positions Flux 2 as a strong contender in the competitive generative AI space. The company’s co-founders—Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann—were former researchers at Stability AI, where they played key roles in developing the widely used Stable Diffusion models. Their expertise has been instrumental in Black Forest Labs’ rapid progress, helping the company build a reputation for technical innovation and high-quality AI outputs.