Temasek backs Black Forest Labs’ $300M Series B funding

Black Forest Labs, the Germany-based category-defining visual intelligence company behind FLUX, announced Monday a $300 million Series B led by AMP and Salesforce Ventures, at a post-money valuation of $3.25 billion. The firm said in a statement that in addition to returning investors, Black Forest Labs is working 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. 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 $450 million. The Series B investment will accelerate Black Forest Labs’ research and development, hiring, and infrastructure efforts as the team advances its flagship model family, FLUX – including the recently released FLUX.2. As demand grows for high-performance, openly available systems, the company will expand its research to push the frontier of visual intelligence. This investment also marks the next step in the company’s mission to deliver frontier artificial intelligence (AI) research at global scale and demonstrates that an independent lab can operate at the frontier alongside the world’s leading model developers. “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.” said Robin Rombach, Black Forest Labs’ Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. “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,” he added. Founded in 2024 by the researchers who pioneered modern image generation with latent diffusion, Black Forest Labs has become a global category leader in visual intelligence, repeatedly setting the benchmark for frontier open-source and enterprise-grade multimodal systems. In just over a year, the firm’s state-of-the-art models are amongst 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 stands at the intersection of breakthrough research and commercial excellence,” said Nowi Kallen, Managing Director, Salesforce Ventures. “The caliber of the team and its open-source heritage drives incredible adoption and an enterprise-first model with impressive revenue traction, “Black Forest Labs is building the next-generation, efficiency-first platform for generative images, and we’re excited to support their journey,” he added. Anjney Midha from AMP also said 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,” he added. Temasek backs Databricks in $15B financing to boost AI globally