FREIBURG, Germany – A small German AI company announced Monday it has vacuumed up $300 million in fresh capital, catapulting its valuation to a rather indulgent $3.25 billion.
Investors apparently lined up faster than tourists at the real Black Forest gateau counter, with Salesforce Ventures and former a16z partner Anjney Midha slicing the cake while NVIDIA, General Catalyst, Temasek, and a cameo-heavy guest list fought over the cherries.
Somewhere in the venture-capital universe, spreadsheets just spontaneously combusted from valuation envy. Meanwhile, every founder who still pronounces “Series B” with a trembling voice is frantically updating their deck to include more trees and fewer numbers.
The round instantly makes Black Forest Labs the most expensive Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte never actually baked, proving once again that in AI, calories don’t count if you call them “parameters.”
Black Forest Labs launched a mere sixteen months ago in August 2024 and has already achieved the Silicon Valley equivalent of going from zero to unicorn while everyone else was still looking for the stable.
The company is best known for its Flux models that quietly power image generation inside Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot, meaning every time someone asks Grok to draw a cat in a spacesuit, a server in Freiburg earns its keep.
Its client list now reads like the VIP section of an AI conference: Adobe, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, Vercel, and fal.ai all happily pay for German precision in pixel form.
The newest darling, Flux 2, can now render legible text inside images without looking like a ransom note written by a toddler. It also accepts up to ten reference images, essentially letting users say “make it look like this, but better, and hold the existential dread.”
Resolution now climbs to 4K, which is tech-speak for “your grandparents can finally see the AI-generated dragon without squinting.”
Leading the lab are Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann—three former Stability AI researchers who helped birth Stable Diffusion before deciding German work-life balance sounded nicer than London chaos.
They left Stability AI, started Black Forest Labs, and promptly built models that outperform their old employer’s offerings. Somewhere, an irony meter just filed for workers’ compensation.
The $300 million war chest will reportedly fuel more research and development, which translates to hiring more PhDs who can explain why the AI put six fingers on the hand again.
Investors seem unbothered by the lack of revenue figures, apparently satisfied with the phrase “we make the pretty pictures that make Grok look talented.”
One limited partner was overheard muttering that at a $3.25 billion valuation, each generated image costs roughly the price of a small Bavarian village.
Still, with NVIDIA writing checks and Canva plus Figma joining the round, the message is clear: everyone wants a slice before the forest runs out of cherries.
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