"Black Forest Labs, the visual AI startup behind the Flux image models, has quietly become one of Europe's most valuable AI companies. That would be notable for any 18-month-old company. It's more striking in a world where nearly 80% of last year's roughly $270 billion in AI venture dollars went to North America, and 60% went to AI companies based in the Bay Area. Europe captures just 13.6%. In other words: The center of gravity for AI money is still the U.S.-and yet one of the most important visual‑AI companies is being built in Germany."
"The Freiburg‑based company raised a $300 million Series B at a $3.25 billion valuation late last year, in one of Europe's largest AI financings. The round was co‑led by AMP and Salesforce Ventures, with strategic checks from Canva and Figma and participation from a who's who of AI investors like a16z and Nvidia. For context, European generative‑AI startups raised about $6.1 billion between 2019 and 2024-a sliver of global GenAI funding."
"Black Forest Labs's models now power image generation and editing behind the scenes for a growing lineup that includes big‑tech platforms and productivity apps, from Meta to Canva. Cofounder Robin Rombach cites Flux Kontext, the company's editing model, as a glimpse of what they think "visual intelligence" should look like. It was "the first model that was able to edit images and maintain character consistency," he says. "You could, for example, take an image of yourself and then edit the image and maintain your likeness-it would still look like yourself afterwards.""
Black Forest Labs is an 18‑month‑old visual‑AI startup based in Freiburg, Germany. The company raised a $300 million Series B at a $3.25 billion valuation, attracting strategic and venture participation from AMP, Salesforce Ventures, Canva, Figma, a16z, and Nvidia. Its Flux image models power image generation and editing across platforms including Meta and Canva. Flux Kontext enables image editing while maintaining character consistency and likeness. The company uses open‑source and open‑weights releases as a top‑of‑funnel adoption strategy. European generative‑AI funding remains a small share of global investment despite this financing.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]