Used by Adobe, Canva and Meta, Germany’s Black Forest Labs lands €258 million to scale its visual-AI platform

Freigburg-based Black Forest Labs, the visual intelligence company behind FLUX, today announced a €258 million ($300 million) Series B in order to accelerate research and development, hiring, and infrastructure efforts as the team advances its flagship model family – including the recently released FLUX.2

The round was led by AMP and Salesforce Ventures, at a post-money valuation of €2.79 billion ($3.25 billion). The round follows a previously unannounced Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from BroadLight Capital, Creandum, Earlybird VC, General Catalyst, Northzone, and Nvidia, bringing total funds raised to over €387 million ($450 million).

“We built Black Forest Labs to advance visual intelligence at the frontier, and we’re proud to be doing so from both our hometown in southern Germany and the heart of innovation in San Francisco,” says Robin Rombach, CEO and co-founder.

European activity in visual and adjacent AI fields during 2025 shows several smaller but relevant funding rounds: Munich’s 36ZERO Vision raised €3.6 million to scale its data-efficient visual-inspection platform; Swiss–US startup General Intuition secured €114 million to advance embodied and vision-based AI for robotics and drones; London-based Wonder obtained €2.6 million for its generative-AI creative studio; and Neuracore, also in London, raised €2.5 million to build unified robot-learning infrastructure.

Combined, these rounds represent roughly €123 million in funding across Europe’s visual/robotics-vision ecosystem in 2025. Against this backdrop, Black Forest Labs’ €258 million Series B stands out as a substantially larger investment than the rest of the year’s sector-adjacent funding combined, underscoring both the scale of its multimodal model ambitions and its distinct position within Europe’s visual-AI landscape.

“Visual AI is shifting from impressive image generation to genuine understanding and the market for our products is growing rapidly as a result. This is just the beginning. We’re building multimodal models that unify perception, generation, and reasoning – foundational infrastructure for how we’ll shape and experience the visual world,” adds Rombach.

Founded in 2024 by the researchers innovating modern image generation with latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion, Black Forest Labs is focused on being global category leader in visual intelligence, setting the benchmark for frontier open-source and enterprise-grade multimodal systems.

In just over a year, Black Forest Labs’ state-of-the-art models are reportedly among the most popular in the world, ranking as the leading text-to-image models on Hugging Face with tens of millions of downloads, in addition to partnerships with over a dozen Fortune 500 enterprises.

Black Forest Labs’ strategy of pairing open, efficiently trained foundational research with large-scale enterprise deployments has enabled the company to scale quickly while developing models that are technically sophisticated, locally accessible, and responsibly developed.

Partners as varied as Adobe, Canva, Deutsche Telekom, and Meta have integrated FLUX models directly into creative and enterprise workflows, reflecting broad, global demand for high-performance visual intelligence.

“Black Forest Labs is building visual AI that meets the expectations of enterprise teams: dependable models, clear integration paths and an open approach that supports a broader ecosystem. Their focus on responsible development and practical deployment makes them a strong partner for customers adopting AI at scale,” says Nowi Kallen, Salesforce Ventures. “We are enthusiastic about their progress and look forward to them continuing to contribute to the global conversation on how AI is developed and deployed.”

In addition to returning investors, Black Forest Labs works with Temasek, Air Street Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, StepStone Group, Visionaries Club, S32 Ventures, Notion Capital, the European Tech Collective, Shutterstock, QuantumLight Capital, Canva, Figma Ventures, Cherry, Adobe Ventures, Deutsche Telekom’s T.Capital, LEA Partners, SV Angel, Lux Capital, Samsung Next, Headline , and angel investors including Nico Rosberg (Founder, Rosberg Ventures & F1 World Champion), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Michael Ovitz, Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs), and Clem Delangue (Hugging Face), who also participated in the rounds.

“Black Forest Labs represents the rare combination of frontier research and disciplined execution. The team has shown that a small group of world-class scientists, operators, and engineers can meaningfully advance visual intelligence and deliver models that creators and developers rely on every day. We are proud to support their long-term vision and excited for what this next chapter will enable,” said Anjney Midha, AMP.

EU-Startups has previously featured Black Forest Labs in multiple listicles – including its 2025 rankings of promising German startups, notable European AI companies, and automation-focused AI ventures.

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