Black Forest Labs
German company developing the FLUX family of text-to-image generation models, available as open-weight and via API.
📍 Germany 🇩🇪, Freiburg im Breisgau
Product overview
Black Forest Labs develops the FLUX family of image generation models from Freiburg, Germany. Founded in August 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser, the researchers behind the Stable Diffusion architecture at LMU Munich, the company raised over $450 million including a $300 million Series B in December 2025 at a $3.25 billion valuation. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, and Earlybird VC. FLUX models use a 12-billion-parameter rectified flow transformer architecture. FLUX.1 Schnell is released under Apache 2.0 for free use. FLUX.1 Pro and FLUX 1.1 Pro are commercial, with the latter achieving the highest Elo score on the Artificial Analysis image arena. FLUX.2, released November 2025, introduced multi-reference support, HEX color matching, and smaller variants (4B and 9B parameters) under Apache 2.0. FLUX Kontext Pro handles image editing and is integrated into Adobe Photoshop. Models are available through the BFL API (starting at $0.014 per image), Hugging Face, Replicate, and fal.ai. Major licensing deals include a multi-year agreement with Meta worth approximately $140 million. Other integrations span Adobe, Canva, Microsoft Azure, Mistral AI (Le Chat), and Deutsche Telekom. A text-to-video model is under development. KEY FEATURES: - FLUX.1 and FLUX.2 image generation with 12B-parameter transformer architecture - Open-weight models (Apache 2.0) alongside commercial API from $0.014 per image - Integrated into Adobe Photoshop, Canva, and Mistral Le Chat - Multi-year licensing deal with Meta worth approximately $140 million - Text-to-video model under development as of early 2026