Black Forest Labs
AI Image & Video Generation
- Valuation
- Undisclosed
- Total Funding
- $100M+
- Employees
- ~50
About Black Forest Labs
Black Forest Labs is the company behind FLUX, the state-of-the-art text-to-image model family. Founded by the original creators of Stable Diffusion (Robin Rombach and team from CompVis/Stability AI), FLUX.1 Pro and FLUX 1.1 Pro Ultra (4MP) set the benchmark for photorealism and prompt accuracy in 2024-2025. The open-weights FLUX.1 [schnell] and [dev] variants became the most widely adopted open-source image generation models post-Stable Diffusion.
Company History
Founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, and Patrick Esser — the same team that created Stable Diffusion while at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and CompVis lab. After Stability AI's troubles, they spun out to form Black Forest Labs and released the FLUX model family in August 2024. FLUX.1 Pro immediately outperformed Midjourney v6 and DALL-E 3 on prompt adherence and photorealism benchmarks. FLUX 1.1 Pro Ultra (November 2024) added native 4MP resolution. The open-weight FLUX.1 [schnell] became the most popular open-source image model on Hugging Face within months of release.
Company Timeline
4 milestones- 2024Black Forest Labs founded by original Stable Diffusion creators
- Aug 2024FLUX.1 family released — Pro, Dev (open), Schnell (open, fast)
- Nov 2024FLUX 1.1 Pro Ultra launched — native 4MP, best photorealism benchmarks
- 2025FLUX Video (alpha) for text-to-video; FLUX Fill for inpainting; ControlNet-style Canny/Depth variants
Products & Services
7- FLUX.1 Pro
- FLUX.1 Dev (open)
- FLUX.1 Schnell (open)
- FLUX 1.1 Pro Ultra (4MP)
- FLUX Fill
- FLUX Canny/Depth
- FLUX Video (alpha)
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Robin Rombach (Co-founder)
- Andreas Blattmann (Co-founder)
- Patrick Esser (Co-founder)
Key Investors
- General Catalyst
- A*, Andreessen Horowitz
Competitive Landscape
- Midjourney
- OpenAI (DALL-E)
- Stability AI
- Adobe Firefly