• Portfolio

Welcome, Black Forest Labs!

Visual infrastructure for the AI age.

December 1, 2025

by Sam Ackah-Yensu and Nowi Kallen

• Founders: Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser
• Sector: Generative AI
• Location: Freiburg, Germany

The Opportunity

Over the past few years, the promise of AI-generated media has become clear in the stunning, one-off outputs we see daily. The problem? AI-generated media is still confined to the consumer space, failing to achieve true enterprise traction. As core AI technology improves, we anticipate an inflection point where generative media shifts from an exciting novelty to an essential, non-negotiable component of creative workflows.

In this future, the competitive advantage belongs to those who can iterate fastest. When quality and design are key competitive differentiators, the company that can compress the create-review-refine cycle wins, enabling:

• Marketing teams that test hundreds of variations in days, not weeks. 
• Creative agencies that collaborate with clients in real-time. 
• E-commerce and social media platforms that generate product imagery on demand. 

However, the generative media market is still in its infancy and needs to deliver on three key promises:

1. Creative professionals need precise control and brand coherence for robust implementation in their workflows. Most models optimize for artistic novelty rather than reliable consistency. Teams can’t rely on a tool that generates slightly different aesthetics each time (drift is a real problem) and is not consistent with the brand’s identity.
2. The infrastructure for deploying these models needs to improve in terms of speed and scale. When generating tens of thousands of digital assets, latency and compute costs become business metrics.
3. Models must be flexible and trustworthy. Creators, enterprises, and developers require infrastructure with managed APIs for convenience, open weights for customization, and local inference for privacy, without sacrificing quality.

The Solution

Black Forest Labs (BFL) is building the foundational infrastructure for production-grade generative images through its proprietary FLUX family of models (e.g., FLUX 1, FLUX 2, FLUX Dev, FLUX Kontext, FLUX Pro). BFL’s approach is to build architecture around what forward-thinking enterprises, creators, and developers need to bring their imagination to life.

On precision and brand coherence, FLUX delivers hyperrealistic image generation with exceptional prompt adherence and character consistency. Their suite of editing tools (Fill, Depth, Canny, Redux) provides the precise, non-destructive control that maintains brand consistency across iterative cycles. In terms of speed and enterprise economics, BFL’s models are architected from the ground up to be production-ready, delivering the sub-second latency that real-time creative collaboration demands, while making enterprise-scale deployment economically viable. On infrastructure flexibility, BFL has made its FLUX family of models available across multiple channels, including API, open-source, licensing, and browser via Playground. This unique tiered approach means developers get genuine choice, enterprises get full control, and organizations can match deployment to their specific needs without compromising on quality.

Equally important, the company marries precision and rigor with a global perspective on responsible AI development. BFL has embedded responsible AI and content safety as core business principles. The team employs rigorous dataset filtering, post-training safeguards, and content moderation, utilizing tools from organizations like the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). This commitment to safety ensures that enterprises and creators alike can deploy their models with confidence. 

Why We’re Backing Black Forest Labs

Led by CEO Robin Rombach, Black Forest Labs’ founding team is made up of the original co-creators behind latent diffusion, adversarial distillation, and Stable Diffusion: groundbreaking research papers that have shaped the visual AI field. In fact, their work has influenced the core architectures of popular models, such as DALL-E and Sora, among others. At an incredible pace, they’ve translated their work into a leading research lab for visual intelligence, and we believe BFL will be the source of the next major advance in visual research. The team’s track record of innovation and respect within the industry has helped to attract and retain world-class talent, enabling BFL to build one of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

What’s most impressive is how quickly BFL has achieved market leadership across multiple channels. FLUX models are among the most downloaded (400 million+) and used globally across Hugging Face, fal AI, Replicate, and Together AI. At the same time, BFL has secured enterprise partnerships with blue-chip companies like Adobe, Meta, and Microsoft.

Lastly, the market dynamics are unmistakable. As organizations accelerate their shift from experimental generative media to production-grade systems, they need infrastructure that can be trusted at scale. BFL is uniquely positioned here, offering a multi-channel solution that empowers enterprises and developers to select the optimal deployment model without sacrificing any of their core requirements

What’s Ahead

BFL is poised to become the foundational platform upon which the next generation of creative tools and enterprise workflows are built. Generative AI is expanding beyond text and code into the visual world — where seeing, understanding, and creating images will drive the next wave of applications in design, media, and human-computer interaction. BFL is at the forefront of this shift, building the visual infrastructure for the AI age. 

We’re thrilled to co-lead Black Forest Labs’ $300M Series B round with Anjney Midha at AMP, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Northzone, Creandum, Bain Capital Ventures, and others.

Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Black Forest Labs!